On Apr 8, 2013, at 6:50 PM, Brian Walters <apathy...@lyons-ryan.org> wrote:
> Quoting Rob Studdert <distudio.p...@gmail.com>: > >> On 9 April 2013 06:30, John Sessoms <jsessoms...@nc.rr.com> wrote: >> >>> Just out of curiosity, what real life problem does that equation relate to? >> >> In solving electronics engineering problems this sort of combination >> of operators wouldn't be that uncommon. >> >>> It's been long enough since I'd done school-book math that I had to >>> Google "order of operations" to be sure I got the answer right. >> >> After watching that FB thread I feel that I'm in a privileged position >> that my secondary schooling left me with an indelible memory of order >> of operations (and we had no swanky acronyms, we just had to remember >> it like times tables) plus I can solve trig problems so long as I have >> a table or calculator handy and logs are no mystery. I can't help >> thinking that if order of operations in second class mechanical maths >> is a problem what change would anyone have had with basic algebra? > > > > Yeah, I'm with John here. In my ancient schooldays, equations like this > would be presented with parentheses to define the order of operations, as in: > > 6-(1x0)+(2/2) = 7 > > I'm not sure when the parentheses idea was dropped. I suspect the parenthesis were dropped on the Facebook problems to create "gotcha" posts. I too was accustomed to parenthetically ordered operations. I did remember that calculations must be performed in an order that's not linear, and that multiplication and division take precedence, but the post was meant to embarrass the unthinking masses rather than accurately test math skills. > > > -- > Cheers > > Brian > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > Brian Walters > Western Sydney Australia > http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
