My mom’s a mathematician, she got annoyed when I said that the order of operations is just arbitrary rules made up by people a couple thousand years ago
It’s organized so that more powerful operations get precedence, which seems natural.
Set aside intentionally confusing expressions. The basic idea of the Order of Operations holds water even without ever formally learning the rules.
If an addition result comes first and gets exponentiated, the changes from the addition are exaggerated. It makes addition more powerful than it should be. The big stuff should happen first, then the more granular operations. Of course, there are specific cases where we need to reorder, or add clarity, which is why human decisions about groupings are at the top.
The big stuff should happen first, then the more granular operations
The “big stuff” is stuff that is defined in terms of something else. i.e. exponents are shorthand for repeated multiplication… and multiplication is shorthand for repeated addition, hence they have to be done in that order or you get wrong answers.
“Wrong answers” only according to our current order of operations, math still works if you, for example, make additions come first (as long as you’re consistent about it).
OFC it is a convention and to change it you would have to change all expressions ever written all at the same time, to avoid confusion between competing standards. I’m not arguing that it should be changed, only that there is no ‘high truth’ behind it.
My mom’s a mathematician, she got annoyed when I said that the order of operations is just arbitrary rules made up by people a couple thousand years ago
I’m not surprised. Here’s the proof of the order of operations rules. Also, the equals sign wasn’t invented until the 16th century, so only 500 years old at most (the earliest references to order of operations are over 400 years ago).
That proof for the order of operations sure seems to rely a lot on our current order of operations…
That proof for the order of operations sure seems to rely a lot on our current order of operations
Doesn’t use order of operations at all. It only uses the definitions of the operators. i.e. 3x4=3+3+3+3 by definition. i.e. nothing to do with order of operations.
If I have 1 2l bottle of milk, and 4 3l bottles of milk, how many litres of milk do I have? It can be solved by simply adding them up - again, nothing to do with order of operations here, just simple addition. Now, write it out as a mathematical expression which uses multiplication, and tell me which order of operations gets you the right answer. Voila! Welcome to how we worked out what the order of operations rules had to be.
