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I agree with your core message, that the issue is caused by bad notation. However I don’t really see why you consider implicit multiplication to be the sole reason. In my mind, a/bc is equally as ambiguous as a/b*c. The symbols are not important.
You don’t even consider this in your article, instead you seem to take the position that the operations are resolved from left to right. This idea probably comes from programming languages, as they commonly use this convention, but I haven’t seen this defined in mathematics anywhere. I’m open to being wrong here, so if you can show me such a definition from an authoritative source (maybe ISO) I’d be thankful.
As it stands, you basically claim “the original notation is ambiguous, but with explicit × the answer is obviously nine, because my two calculators agree”, even though you just discounted calculator proofs. By the way, both calculators explicitly define this left-to-right order in their documentation.
The ISO section 7.1.3 you quoted is very reasonable and succinct, and contradicts your claim that explicit multiplication sign removes ambiguity. There would be no need for this section if a left-to-right rule existed.
3·1 year agoRegister to vote. Americans have to register or they cannot vote.
It is, Locutus was a commander in the battle at Wolf 359.
Hashicorp recently switched Terraform’s license from open source to a business license. Community forked it in a month. Source: opentofu.org
3·1 year agoIn 2020, an 18-year-old Russian motorist froze to death after he and a friend were stranded in a vehicle for a week after following a Google Maps route through Serbia’s “road of bones”.
The road of bones is not in Serbia, it’s in Russia.
5·1 year agoMaybe not today, but getting serious competitors is another long term consequence.
When you get away from light pollution you can see a lot more stars and a bright line called milky way. We are part of the milky way and you can see the rest of it.
It looks [https://hr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datoteka:Milky_Way_Night_Sky_Black_Rock_Desert_Nevada.jpg](like this).
251·1 year agoWhy do you think it’s obsolete? I suppose nowadays we can use AI generative models to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible, but it still can be hard.
People hide this pattern called “loss” in unrelated context to confuse people. And people who recognize it feel smart, or angry, or disappointed. It’s a form of mild trolling, there is not much more to it. The meme originates from a comic but this is completely irrelevant.