48÷2(9+3) = ????

Just asked an engineering professor from UH and a retired calculus professor from Penn State, they both got 288.

 

wow you people are r****ded. you have to distribute the two to the nine and the three first.

 

They were not taught different fundamentals. The left to right rule is accepted due to poor formatting of an expression (like we see in this thread). It provides for consistency (its not a mathematical law). Technically because of the poor format the answer could be 2 or 288...BUT mathematicians did not want people getting different answers, so on purpose they came up with a rule to have people calculate from left to right so everyone gets the same answer.

 

But you also agreed that:

[Y / -(X)] and [Y / -1(X)] were the same thing. The syntax is in question here which is why I argued for both answers.

 

PEMDAS does not mean multiplication BEFORE division. the two are interchangeable. think about it. every division can be written as a multiplication and vice versa. you always go left to right once all the parentheses is taken care of.

 

lolUHengineeringlol


j/k... go coogs

 

It is clear that level of education has little bearing in this instance. As none of us have studied order of operations beyond grammar/middle school, and even then were unlikely to have seen a question phrased in such a way.

 

they must work at Chuck E Cheese's

 

I cant believe so many people are getting 288...lol, you gotta be kidding me. This is elementary mathematics. Parenthesis first.

The answer is 2.

or the answer is 288.

288 is the correct answer. Unless its 2.

 

Why don't you make fun of the calc prof.. I tell you that guy is brilliant

 

This is not really a math question, its more a parsing/syntax question. I also initially evaluated it to 2 (the 2 and (9+3) seemed more tightly coupled), but of course that's wrong if we go by the established parsing convention.

 

Well, considering I've never seen anyone get it right, including my mentor, Dr. Leaky at M.I.T, I guess if anyone here can solve that problem I'd see to it that none of you ever have to open another math book again... for the rest of your lives.

 

he didnt get that answer...the person next to him did. He just copied it.

 

I believe you cheated off the wrong person

 

So math isn't a universal language.

 

I got 24 *12 = 288

 

No, I actually got an email with the answer. It was given to me.

On a side note, the answer is 288. Initially, I thought 2...but its 24 x 12 = 288.

 

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