this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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The annoying prevalence of this meme suggests to me that an alarming number of people lack even a middle-school understanding of basic arithmetic.
Wait until you hear what the average reading level is.
It's not arithmetic at all, it's just about convention aka how to communicate math. The author didn't make themselves clear enough so people misunderstand what calculation they mean.
They're rules actually.
Yes they did, someone screwed up the answers, just like in this book...
There's only 1 possible answer to it.
The order of operations is part of arithmetic. Although, the memes about it are certainly not good mathematics communication.
There's a useful distinction to be made. The order of operations is different between conventional written maths, calculators, reverse polish notation, python, etc. In contrast there is no disagreement over what the result of any individual binary operations is
The notation might be different, but the rules are universal
The rules are about how you interpret the notation, so that makes no sense.
No, the notation definitions are about how to interpret the notation. The rules are about how to do the Maths.
So if you have one "notation definition" as you call it which says that 2+2*3 means ”first add two to two, then multiply by three" and another which says "first multiply two by three, then add it to two", why on earth do the "rules" have anything further to say about order of operations?