this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (95 children)

Presuming PEMDAS is our order of operations and the 5 next to the parentheses indicates multiplication...

2+5(8-5) -> 2+5(3) -> 2+15=17

Other than adding a multiplication indicator next to the left parentheses for clarification (I believe it's * for programming and text chat purposes, a miniature "x" or dot for pen and paper/traditional calculators), this seems fine, yeah.

...I worry about how many people may not understand how to solve equations like these.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world -1 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

I prefer BM-DAS, no one's out here doing exponents, and no one calls brackets "parentheses"...

[–] cobysev@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).

Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.

[–] SmartmanApps@programming.dev -4 points 4 days ago

The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these)

They're all brackets. Parentheses is actually the part inside the ().

[–] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm a theoretical physics grad student and a night school maths teacher, I have never heard this distinction. People in academia around me call them round and square brackets.

[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It's a US vs UK (and probably others) distinction. The ( ) are almost never called brackets in the US, unless it's a regional thing I'm not aware of. Also the [ ] didn't get used in any math classes I was in the US up through calculus except for matrices.

[–] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

Interesting! Nobody at my institute is a native English speaker. They're from several European and some Asian and south American countries.

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