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Troll maths


Le Stu

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There's a guy at Aberdeen College that loves his calculators. Forgot his name but he's a legend when it comes to maths. You'll know who I'm on about.

The head of the maths department at the school I went to wrote programmes for graphical calculators. Had a holster on his belt for calculators and everything

Calculator Software .co.uk - About the TI Software and its Designer

Extremely nerdy but also thoroughly nice chap. He loved Blackadder, nuff said.

Graphical calculators are ACE. I used to sit in Maths classes playing poker.

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It's 288.

BODMAS.....brackets, orders, division, mult, add, subtract

48/2(9+3)

This is the same as saying 48/2*(9+3)

So, first expand the brackets:

48/2*12

Division takes precedence over multiplication so, next divide 48 by 2:

24 * 12

Last do the multiplication.....288.

It is absolutely not 2!

You can also expand the brackets as:

48 / 2(9+3)

48 / 18 + 6

8.67 (to 2dp)

:up:

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482(9+3) ?

I make it equal to 'F' for fail.

As pointed out division and multiplication are of equal weighting so you do not have enough information to do anything other than take a guess at which way the person who wrote it means it to be. You can resolve it to:

48/2x12

but without extra parentheses you have no idea whether the denominator or the numerator is meant to include the 12.

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Multiplication and division are inverse functions of each other. They actually have the same importance which is another reason this causes confusion,

....and it is exactly because they have equal importance that we need a convention that tells us how to evaluate ambiguous looking expressions in the correct order. That convention is BODMAS, and that requires you do the division first.

Of course, the unambiguous way to do this is to use more brackets.....but in the absence of these brackets, you've got to follow the precedence rules.

288.

:gringo:

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....and it is exactly because they have equal importance that we need a convention that tells us how to evaluate ambiguous looking expressions in the correct order. That convention is BODMAS, and that requires you do the division first.

Of course, the unambiguous way to do this is to use more brackets.....but in the absence of these brackets, you've got to follow the precedence rules.

288.

:gringo:

BODMAS=BOMDAS=BODMSA=BOMDSA

Multiplication and division have the same weighting, addition and subtraction have the same weighting.

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....and it is exactly because they have equal importance that we need a convention that tells us how to evaluate ambiguous looking expressions in the correct order. That convention is BODMAS, and that requires you do the division first.

Of course, the unambiguous way to do this is to use more brackets.....but in the absence of these brackets, you've got to follow the precedence rules.

288.

:gringo:

ah, but 2(9+3) isn't 2*(9+3), it's ((2*9)+(2*3))

makes more sense if you use x= 2

x(9+3) = 9x+3x = 12x = 12*2 = 24.

If it was explicitly 2*(9+3) rather than 2(9+3) then that would be a different matter. This is a confusion of notation.

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ah, but 2(9+3) isn't 2*(9+3), it's ((2*9)+(2*3))

makes more sense if you use x= 2

x(9+3) = 9x+3x = 12x = 12*2 = 24.

If it was explicitly 2*(9+3) rather than 2(9+3) then that would be a different matter. This is a confusion of notation.

You've multiplied first, then resolved the brackets.

This is wrong. You know it is.

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The latter as 2(9+3) is a natural expression. It isn't 2*(9+3).

They're exactly the same thing. You could call it laziness but it sure saves you getting hand cramps if you don't have to write a multiplication sign (and save on confusion as x is the most common term for an unknown variable) unless you really have to, i.e. between two actual numbers.

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They're exactly the same thing. You could call it laziness but it sure saves you getting hand cramps if you don't have to write a multiplication sign (and save on confusion as x is the most common term for an unknown variable) unless you really have to, i.e. between two actual numbers.

I only substituted x to show that the rules for expanding parenthesis in algebra work. it's no different with the actual numbers. 2 and (9+3) are factors of 24.

look at it this way

48 / x(9+3)

there's no way in hell you'd divide by x first.

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