this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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I'm a Maths teacher with a Masters - thanks for asking - how about you?
You mean your invalid point, that I debunked?
Conventions are optional, rules aren't.
He's well-known to be wrong about his "history", and if you read through the comments you'll find plenty of people telling him that, including references. Cajori wrote the definitive books about the history of Maths (notation). They're available for free on the Internet Archive - no need to believe some random crank and his blog.
Dear colleague,
By qualification I meant explanation. My doctorate is irrelevant to the truth.
Since you asked, my larger point was about the unhelpful nature of this content, which makes students of math feel inordinately inferior or superior hinged entirely on a single point of familiarity. I don’t handle early math education, but many of my students arrive with baggage from it that hinders their progress, leading me to suspect that early math education sometimes discourages students unnecessarily. In particular, these gotcha-style math memes IMO deepen students’ belief that they’re just bad at math. Hence my dislike of them.
Re: Dave Peterson, I’ll need to read more about this debate regarding the history of notation and I’ll search for the “proven rules” you mentioned (proofs mean something very specific to me and I can’t yet imagine what that looks like WRT order of operations).
If what riled you up was my use of the word “conventions” I can use another, but note that conventions aren’t necessarily “optional” when being understood is essential. Where one places a comma in writing can radically change the meaning of a sentence, for example. My greater point however has nothing to do with that. Here I am only concerned about the next generation of maths student and how viral content like this can discourage them unnecessarily.