Just a quickie in reponse to the comments, for which I am extremely grateful, from A and Eats Wombats on the previous post. I love opportunities to learn new things.
Question : Was the bomdas/bodmas rule developped because of computing?
Please see here.
A quick and extremely unscientific poll revealed that 13/15 poeple met over the past few days give the answer to 7+4×5 as 55. Of the two people who gave 27 as a definite answer, one was a French Maths teacher and the other a computer programmer. For the other 13, most of whom I’d class as reasonably well educated, the answer 27 only came up when shown the calculation 4×5+7. And yes, all 15 now think I’m a bit ‘touched’ for accosting them with slips of paper with sums on!
TTFN
P.S. On a flippant note, to what extent have spreadsheets contributed to the current financial crisis by giving answers not expected by us ‘back of the envelope’ calculators?
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I never heard of the bomdas/bodmas rule, but that’s only because it was never given an acronym in my day. Division and multiplication have equal priority and are evaluated left to right, so bomdas and bodmas should be the same.
Spreadsheets haven’t been involved at all in the current financial crisis, not directly anyway. The cause lies in the realm of psychology not calculation.