this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Your obviously is only a convention and not everyone agree with that. Not even all peogramming languages or calculators.
If you wanted obviously, it would have to have different order or parentheses or both. Of course everything in math is convention but I mean more obvious.
2+2*4 is obvious with PEDMAS, but hardy obvious to common people
2+(2*4) is more obvious to common people
2*4+2 is even more obvious to people not good with math. I would say this is the preferred form.
(2*4)+2 doesn't really add more to it, it just emphasises it more, but unnecessarily.
Honestly that’s my pet peeve about this category of content. Over the years I’ve seen (at least) hundreds of these check-out-how-bad-at-math-everyone-is posts and it’s nearly always order of operations related. Apparently, a bunch of people forgot (or just never learned) PEMDAS.
Now, having an agreed-upon convention absolutely matters for arriving at expected computational outcomes, but we call it a convention for a reason: it’s not a “correct” vs “incorrect” principle of mathematics. It’s just a rule we agreed upon to allow consistent results.
So any good math educator will be clear on this. If you know the PEMDAS convention already, that’s good, since it’s by far the most common today. But if you don’t yet, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean you’re too dumb to math. With a bit of practice, you won’t even have to remember the acronym.
Proven rules actually
No we don't - the order of operations rules
The rules most definitely are
proven rules which are true whether you agree to it or not! 😂
Yep
No it isn't.
As long as you know the rules then that's all that matters
Dear Mr Rules,
I’m not sure what motivates you to so generously offer your various dyadic tokens of knowledge on this subject without qualification while ignoring my larger point, but will assume in good faith that your thirst for knowledge rivals that of your devotion to The Rules.
First, a question: what are conventions if not agreed upon rules? Second, here is a history of how we actually came to agree upon the aforementioned rules which you may find interesting:
https://www.themathdoctors.org/order-of-operations-historical-caveats/
Happy ruling to you.
I'm a Maths teacher with a Masters - thanks for asking - how about you?
You mean your invalid point, that I debunked?
Conventions are optional, rules aren't.
He's well-known to be wrong about his "history", and if you read through the comments you'll find plenty of people telling him that, including references. Cajori wrote the definitive books about the history of Maths (notation). They're available for free on the Internet Archive - no need to believe some random crank and his blog.
Dear colleague,
By qualification I meant explanation. My doctorate is irrelevant to the truth.
Since you asked, my larger point was about the unhelpful nature of this content, which makes students of math feel inordinately inferior or superior hinged entirely on a single point of familiarity. I don’t handle early math education, but many of my students arrive with baggage from it that hinders their progress, leading me to suspect that early math education sometimes discourages students unnecessarily. In particular, these gotcha-style math memes IMO deepen students’ belief that they’re just bad at math. Hence my dislike of them.
Re: Dave Peterson, I’ll need to read more about this debate regarding the history of notation and I’ll search for the “proven rules” you mentioned (proofs mean something very specific to me and I can’t yet imagine what that looks like WRT order of operations).
If what riled you up was my use of the word “conventions” I can use another, but note that conventions aren’t necessarily “optional” when being understood is essential. Where one places a comma in writing can radically change the meaning of a sentence, for example. My greater point however has nothing to do with that. Here I am only concerned about the next generation of maths student and how viral content like this can discourage them unnecessarily.