this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
445 points (92.5% liked)

Science Memes

17442 readers
3451 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] marcos@lemmy.world 28 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Some people insist there's no "correct" order for the basic arithmetic operations. And worse, some people insist the correct order is parenthesis first, then left to right.

Both of those sets of people are wrong.

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (2 children)

Hopefully you can see where their confusion might come from, though. PEMDAS is more P-E-MD-AS. If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct. A lot of like, firstgrader math problems are just basic problems that are usually left to right (but should have some extras to highlight PEMDAS somewhere I'd hope).

So they're mostly telling you they only remember as much math as a small child that barely passed math exercizes.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

PE(MD)(AS)

Now just remember to account for those parentheses first...

[–] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 points 10 minutes ago

If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct

If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right doesn't matter.

1 + 2 - 3 = 1 - 3 + 2 = -3 + 2 + 1