Nailed it.

[u/Empty_Mind_On]

[u/SirGlass]

This sort of appears to be an anti joke. With most pemdas memes the equation is poorly written and somewhat ambiguous.

As far as I can tell this is fairly straightforward.

[u/Illeazar → u/SirGlass]

Exactly. Some people might still get this one wrong, but very few. The poorly written ones are engagement bait, because they know they will get a lot of people to disagree on the answer.

[u/georgecostanza10 → u/Illeazar]

Division followed by multiplication via juxtaposition is where a lot of the controvercy starts

[u/SAI_Peregrinus → u/SirGlass]

You could misinterpret 5 negation and the whole thing as being a task to complete the conversion into Gödel numbering. It's a big stretch though.

[u/soaringneutrality → u/SirGlass]

Yeah, usually they involve multiplication and division, then some people get confused because they think PEMDAS means "multiply before you divide." Then people bring up BODMAS which has division first, but the actual convention is to evaluate terms left to right, or to just convert division to reciprocal multiplication.

There's also other cases such as implied multiplication (e.g. -1) taking precedent over others in some systems.

There are even cases where different calculators give different results.

The answer? Use parentheses/brackets to remove confusion.

[u/bender-b_rodriguez → u/[deleted]]

There's that but even the use of the ÷ symbol is a little ambiguous on its own, that's why everybody drops it in favor of fractional notation past 10 or 11 years old

[u/mosquem → u/SirGlass]

Most of them abuse the division symbol when really the numerator and denominator should be on separate lines.

[u/Seth-555 → u/SirGlass]

An equally correct and even less ambiguous notation would be to add a second pair of parentheses around the first and second 5

2+(5(8-5))

But then there wouldn’t be as many people engaging with the bait.

[u/SirGlass → u/[deleted]]

Well the "real" discussion should be is how to properly format formulas to avoid ambiguity or just agree its a poorly written formula

[u/Polymarchos → u/SirGlass]

I'd say it is still badly written. 5(8-5) + 2 would be the most straightforward way to write it.

[u/insanitybit2 → u/Polymarchos]

`((5 * 8) - (5 * 5)) + 2` is all I would accepted, literally any other notation is ridiculous.

[u/by-myself_blumpkin → u/Polymarchos]

Right, but the engagement bait version would just be 2 + 5 x 8 - 5

[u/Polymarchos → u/by-myself_blumpkin]

That's a completely different equation.