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Showing posts with label Order of operations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Order of operations. Show all posts

Tuesday, 24 March 2015

Order of operations

6÷2(2+1)= ?

This problem turned up on my Facebook feed and generated a nice little conversation. We googled it, we tried it out in Wolfram Alpha - same answer came back. Why does this problem (potentially) cause difficulty? What does it tell us about necessary and arbitrary parts of mathematics? What other equivalent expressions could be written?