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http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/03/facebook_math_problem_why_pemdas_doesn_t_always_give_a_clear_answer.html
Slate
MARCH 12 2013 1:04 PM
What Is the Answer to That Stupid Math Problem on Facebook?
And why are people so riled up about it?
By Tara Haelle
Perhaps you’ve seen the problem on Facebook or another forum:
6 ÷ 2(1+2) = ?
It’s one of several similar math problems popping up on social networks recently. Perhaps you, too, thought, “Duh! That’s easy,” and then, as I did, became embroiled in an epically long comment thread while your blood pressure steadily rose because you could not possibly understand why the others doing this problem could not get the right answer.
Perhaps, if you’re a nerd like me, or you teach math as I do, you even fell asleep thinking about this problem, baffled and frustrated about why you were unable to convince intelligent, educated friends that your calculation of this deceptively simple problem was accurate.
So, did you get 1 or 9? We’ll get to the “correct” answer in a moment.
But first, why do we get so riled up about these problems? People don’t usually get into fistfights at the bar over arithmetic, but these math threads are spectacularly vitriolic. A couple of factors are at work in these math debates, according to Robert Glenn Howard, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who specializes in Internet communication and folklore.
For one thing, the whole point of Facebook and other forums is to provide a place for discourse and debate. Yes, there are your cousin’s new-baby pictures, and the opportunity to stalk a crush, but really, people go to social sites to say stuff. And argue about it. “People are already primed to engage in pretty intense deliberations, and that can bleed over into the way they play games,” Howard says.
And that’s exactly what these problems are: games. “Humans have used riddles as a form of play since ancient times,” Howard says. “And sometimes people can get competitive and wrapped up in it.” People use puzzles to show off their smarts, make others feel subordinate, and enjoy telling the story of the game later (as I’m doing right now).
Of course, the fervor with which some people debate basic arithmetic may be a proxy: There’s less at stake in a math debate than a potentially friendship-ending political debate. Arguing over multiplication may even be a way to make a subtle political point, using others’ “wrong” answers to reinforce a broader worldview, such as that the United States has poor math education.
But why do the debates often go on so long? One reason is psychological, another mathematical.
Math is already a source of anxiety for many people, and adding an audience ups the ante. “When there’s an audience, your performance can change,” says Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. Emotional stress can overtake our limited reserves of “cognitive horsepower.” “Often people feel the most stressed when the audience is made up of people they know. It’s very painful to fall on your face in front of your friends and family.”
So people dig in, not realizing the other reason these debates drag on—a mathematical one. We are taught to think of math as an absolute discipline without ambiguity. To an extent, that’s true: Two plus two is always four. But while the math itself lacks ambiguity, the way we express that math requires a system of symbols—otherwise known as language. Consider how often people debate grammar. Math has syntax just as language does—with the same potential for ambiguities. And just as word-based riddles exploit the ambiguities of language, so do these math problems.
Some of you are already insisting in your head that 6 ÷ 2(1+2) has only one right answer, but hear me out. The problem isn’t the mathematical operations. It’s knowing what operations the author of the problem wants you to do, and in what order. Simple, right? We use an “order of operations” rule we memorized in childhood: “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally,” or PEMDAS, which stands for Parentheses Exponents Multiplication Division Addition Subtraction.* This handy acronym should settle any debate—except it doesn’t, because it’s not a rule at all. It’s a convention, a customary way of doing things we’ve developed only recently, and like other customs, it has evolved over time. (And even math teachers argue over order of operations.)
“In earlier times, the conventions didn’t seem as rigid and people were supposed to just figure it out if they were mathematically competent,” says Judy Grabiner, a historian of mathematics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. Mathematicians generally began their written work with a list of the conventions they were using, but the rise of mass math education and the textbook industry, as well as the subsequent development of computer programming languages, required something more codified. That codification occurred somewhere around the turn of the last century. The first reference to PEMDAS is hard to pin down. Even a short list of what different early algebra texts taught reveals how inconsistently the order of operations was applied.
So that brings us back to 6 ÷ 2(1+2). There are three ways to think about this problem—and none is incorrect. (If you don’t believe me, plug it into a few different calculators, or even check out Google, where commenters have argued over Google’s calculator answer.)
One way is to interpret the obelus, or ÷ symbol, as dividing everything to the left of it by everything to the right of it. Textbooks don’t typically use the symbol that way today, but it has been used that way historically. If you calculate the problem using this convention, it’s 6 divided by (2(1+2)), which is 1. Typically, though, if the author wanted you to interpret it that way, she would have used parentheses to indicate as much.
You can alternatively apply PEMDAS as schools do today: Simplify everything inside the parentheses first, then exponents, then all multiplication and division from left to right in the order both operations appear, then all addition and subtraction from left to right in the order both operations appear. (A better acronym would be PEMA, actually, to make it clear that multiplication and division are done together, and addition and subtraction are done together.) By that convention, 6 ÷ 2(1+2) = 6 ÷ 2 × (1+2) = 6 ÷ 2 × 3 = 3 × 3 = 9. If you were taking the ACT, SAT, or GRE (which would probably use parentheses to eliminate confusion), this method would yield the correct answer.
But wait, you say—isn’t that 2 to the left of the parentheses part of simplifying the parentheses? After all, this is what my own Facebook debate partners were arguing. In fact, the 2 is not part of the “P” in PEMDAS for simplifying parentheses, but there is a basis for simplifying the 2(2+1) before it’s divided by 6. It’s called “implied multiplication by juxtaposition.” We know the expression 5x means to multiply 5 and x because they are juxtaposed next to one other. But should these operations be done before a division that occurs to the left of them in a problem? That depends on whom you’re talking to, or what calculator or programming language you’re using.
Internet rumors claim the American Mathematical Society has written “multiplication indicated by juxtaposition is carried out before division,” but no original AMS source exists online anymore (if it ever did). Still, some early math textbooks also taught students to do all multiplications and then all divisions, but most, such as this 1907 high-school algebra textbook, this 1910 textbook, and this 1912 textbook, recommended performing all multiplications and divisions in the order they appear first, followed by additions and subtractions. (This convention makes sense as well with the Canadian and British versions of PEMDAS, such as BEDMAS, BIDMAS, and BODMAS, which all list division before multiplication in the acronym.) The most sensible advice, in a 1917 edition of Mathematical Gazette, recommended using parentheses to avoid ambiguity. (Duh!) But even noted math historian Florian Cajori wrote in A History of Mathematical Notations in 1928-29, "If an arithmetical or algebraical term contains ÷ and ×, there is at present no agreement as to which sign shall be used first."
If it “feels” natural to you that implied multiplication takes precedence over division (whether because it’s next to a parentheses or not), then you would get 6 ÷ 2(1+2) = 6 ÷ (2(3)) = 6 ÷ 6 = 1. That answer would be incorrect on most U.S. standardized tests, but you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. (Insert rant against standardized tests here.) You would just be in the minority about which convention you’re using.
Still unconvinced that arguing over math problems is similar to arguing over whether to use a plural or singular pronoun with indefinite pronouns? Let’s return to the obelus (÷) because a brief history of division signs reveals the ambiguity of the syntax of math. Nearly a half-dozen division signs have been recorded in mathematical notation. The colon was used in a 1633 text, which seems odd until you realize we still use it in ratios (2:3 is commonly the same as 2/3 in ratios).
Even before that, a close parentheses was used in the 1540s, so that 8)24 meant 24 ÷ 8. Again, that looks odd, but we still use it today in long division. It just looks different because we combine it with a different symbol, the lengthy vinculum (--------) across the top, to group together the numbers to be divided. The vinculum is also used over repeating decimal digits and with radicals (√ is used with -------- across the top); you probably just didn’t realize the square root sign was a mashup of two math symbols. A vinculum usually has little to do with division; it’s used in fractions and to group together numbers just as parentheses are.
You might expect 10 ÷ 5 is the same as 10/5 is the same as 10 over a 5 with a vinculum between them, but each has its own eccentricities. We’ve already noted that ÷ can mean “divide the number on the left by the number on the right” or “divide the expression on the left by the expression on the right.” But it gets really tricky when people assume that a slash replaces a vinculum. Does ab/cd = (ab)÷(cd) or ((ab)÷c)÷d? Does a/b/c mean (a)÷(b)÷(c) or a÷(b/c) or (a/b)÷c? (Answer: Use some parentheses!)
The bottom line is that “order of operations” conventions are not universal truths in the same way that the sum of 2 and 2 is always 4. Conventions evolve throughout history in response to cultural and technological shifts. Meanwhile, those ranting online about gaps in U.S. math education and about the “right” answer to these intentionally ambiguous math problems might be, ironically, missing a bigger point.
“To my mind,” says Grabiner, “the major deficit in U.S. math education is that people think math is about calculation and formulas and getting the one right answer, rather than being about exciting ideas that cut across all sorts of intellectual categories, clear and logical thinking, the power of abstraction and a language that lets you solve problems you’ve never seen before.” Even if that language, like any other, can be a bit ambiguous sometimes.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition
Chapter 38
As the superflu epidemic wound down, there was a second epidemic that lasted roughly two weeks. This epidemic was most common in technological societies such as the United States, least common in underdeveloped countries such as Peru or Senegal. In the United States the second epidemic took about 16 percent of the superflu survivors. In places like Peru and Senegal, no more than 3 percent. The second epidemic had no name because the symptoms differed wildly from case to case. A sociologist like Glen Bateman might have called this second epidemic “natural death” or “those ole emergency room blues.” In a strictly Darwinian sense, it was the final cut—the unkindest cut of all, some might have said.
Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died. On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself.
Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, eating when he was hungry, sometimes crying. After a while he stopped crying, because crying did no good. It didn’t bring the people back. At night his sleep was broken by horrible nightmares in which Papa and April and Mike died over and over, their faces swollen black, a terrible rattling sound in their chests as they strangled on their own snot.
At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds’s house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was, picking the berries and eating them until his lips and chin were smeared black. The thorns ripped at his clothes and sometimes at his bare flesh, but he barely noticed. Bees hummed drowsily around him. He never saw the old and rotted well-cover half buried in tall grass and blackberry creepers. It gave under his weight with a grinding, splintering crash, and Sam plunged twenty feet down the rock-lined shaft to the dry bottom, where he broke both legs. He died twenty hours later, as much from fear and misery as from shock and hunger and dehydration.
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: http://hvom.blogspot.com/2012/07/time-traveler-effect-variables.html - posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 7:52 PM Pacific Time USA Sunday 15 July 2012
My knowledge today + (My knowledge until EVENT time travel) = (My knowledge after EVENT time travel) + My knowledge gained post-event
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 15 July 2012 excerpt ends]
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 10:57 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Sunday 27 November 2016
