• AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I"m beginning to wonder if you are willfully misunderstanding my point. Or perhaps you have sunk so much time into this argument you assume I must be wrong. Take another look at my third and fifth paragraphs. I promise, I am not trying to say what you think I’m trying to say.

    I see you putting brackets around the multiplication to make sure it gets done first - same as if you hadn’t used brackets at all! It’s the exact same notation we use now, just with some redundant brackets added to it! And, predictably, you left the addition for last.

    All I did was use the expression necessary to evaluate correctly with the altered order of operations. There are, in fact, times when you can remove brackets that you would otherwise need, for example (x+4)(x-2) would no longer need brackets. The fact that “old” expressions often have to be written with new brackets to evaluate correctly with an altered order of operations is something I fully understand. The presence of brackets where there would be none otherwise does not invalidate my point.

    15²+50²=15x15+50x50=15x65x50=48,750. But 15²+50² is 2,725 according to my calculator. Ooooh, different answers - I wonder which one is right… I wonder which one is right…???

    What? I never wrote 15²+50². That is an expression you copied incorrectly. Your incorrectly copied expression has little relevance to the problem at hand.

    Ok, fine… If I have 1 2 litre bottle of milk, and 4 3 litre bottles of milk - i.e. 2+3x4 - how many litres of milk do I have?

    If we were doing math with an altered order of operations, the expression 2+3x4 is just simply wrong. 2+(3x4) is the expression you need. If you try to do math the same as it is with the regular order of operations, it will not work. But that does not mean math with an altered order of operations is useless. It is still math. It can still be used to “study of the measurement, properties, and relationships of quantities and sets using numbers and symbols”.

    I fully understand that to correctly evaluate an expression written with a certain order of operations in mind, you need to use that order of operations. If someone wrote an expression with a different order of operations in mind, you could solve it with a different order of operations and still get what the author of the expression intended. For example, I write the equation a+2xa-2 with my order of operations, expecting you to use the same order of operations, and tell you to simplify. If you get 3a-2, that is wrong, because you used an order of operations different than the one I intended to be used to solve the problem. Imagine, for a moment, an alternate universe where everyone uses a different order of operations and a+2xa-2 simplifies to a^2-4. All I am trying to say is that that their math, with a different order of operations, would be no less useful then our math.

    In summary, my only claim is that you can still use a different order of operations to manipulate numbers and solve real world problems.

    Waiting on a proof from you.

    I wrote and evaluated all of those expressions in my last comment with a different order of operations in mind, and was still able to come to the correct answer.