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A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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I was good at math and it was one of my favorite core subjects in school, so I know I'm a weirdo but... I never understood how people couldn't understand basic PEMDAS/BEDMAS/Whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it.
Obviously these problems are shitty engagement bait because they don't use parentheses, but still, seeing people fuck up the fact that Multiplication AND Division occur at the same time, and then the next step is Addition AND Subtraction just stupefies me.
Like, did you sleep through 4 years of elementary school to miss that fact??? Even in middle school pre-algebra teachers still did PEMDAS refreshers. I get that once I get out of college I'm probably gonna forget half the pre-calc shit I learned because I won't need it, and I'm not being drilled on it everyday like people in school are, but PEMDAS is a fundamental and basic daily life skill that everyone should know...
I really wish we gave a fuck about US education.
There's no "whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it", the US is the only country using it, and only up to high school. At least I'm not seeing any papers coming out of the US relying on it so at some point they're dropping it and do what everyone else is doing: Write equations such that you don't need a left-to-right rule to disambiguate things. Also, using multiplication by juxtaposition (2x + 4x^2^).
I was bad at math, but I still managed to get through precal and still remember PEMDAS
For me it's the arguments when there is a parentheses but no operator (otherwise known as implied multiplication) in these baits e.g. 15 + 2(4 - 2)
If you don't know operator orders I have given up long ago, but I have seen a few lengthy discussions about this
Oh yeah, that's a fun one.
Where I live, this would be considered juxtaposition, at least by uni professors and scientific community, so 2(4-2) isn't the same as 2×(4-2), even though on their own they're equal.
This way, equations such as 15/2(4-2) end up with a definite solution.
So,
15/2(4-2) = 3.75
While
15/2×(4-2) = 15
Usually, however, it is obvious even without assuming juxtaposition because you can look at previous operations. Not to mention that it's most common with variables (Eg. "2x/3y").