this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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They did the joke wrong. To do it right you need to use the ÷ symbol. Because people never use that after they learn fractions, people treat things like a + b ÷ c + d as
Or (a + b) ÷ (c + d) when they should be treating it as a + (b ÷ c) + d.
That's the most common one of these "troll math" tricks. Because notating as
Is much more common and useful. So people get used to grouping everything around the division operator as if they're in parentheses.
Or
12 / 2(6)
And trying to argue this is 36.
Well, now you might be running into syntax issues instead of PEMDAS issues depending on what they're confused about. If it's 12 over 2*6, it's 1. If it's 12 ÷ 2 x 6, it's 36.
A lot of people try a bunch of funky stuff to represent fractions in text form (like mixing spaces and no spaces) when they should just be treating it like a programmer has to, and use parenthesis if it's a complex fraction in basic text form.
Now that's a good troll math thing because it gets really deep into the weeds of mathematical notation. There isn't one true order of operations that is objectively correct, and on top of that, that's hardly the way most people would write that. As in, if you wrote that by hand, you wouldn't use the
/symbol. You'd either use ÷ or a proper fraction.It's a good candidate for nerd sniping.
Personally, I'd call that 36 as written given the context you're saying it in, instead of calling it 1. But I'd say it's ambiguous and you should notate in a way to avoid ambiguities. Especially if you're in the camp of multiplication like
a(b)being different fromaband/ora × b.The P in PEMDAS means to solve everything within parentheses first; there is no "distribution" step or rule that says multiplying without a visible operator other than parentheses comes first. So yes, 36 is valid here. It's mostly because PEMDAS never shows up in the same context as this sort of multiplication or large fractions