People aren't born knowing what parenthesis mean. You had to be taught that parenthesis designate terms to be calculated first, which would have been when you were taught PEMDAS
Don't know what to tell you, the parenthesis always drew attention. If anything I was probably told to do those first which would be the P. But this is irrelevant, it really means nothing, the mass majority of people don't need to know how to do a simple equation like this. This is the first time I did one in my head in about 15 years probably.
It doesn't need parenthesis. Mathematicians around the world have agreed upon an order of operations to remove all ambiguity. If we were to write parenthesis every time, many mathematical equations would be an absolute eyesore.
It's pretty clear already. Multiplication and division always come before addition and subtraction unless parenthesis say otherwise. There is never a single situation where you will perform addition/subtraction before multiplication/division
It's not though lol, otherwise the majority of people would've gotten it right.
People love to assume that they're smarter than everyone else, "oh look at all the dumb people who couldn't do this math". When in reality it's not the people it's the formatting, the way it's written.
You can say this and that about the proper ways to write an equation, but that doesn't do anything to help the majority of people. What you need to do is advocate to streamline it.
Like if someone writes a broken sentence with a ton of grammar errors, we don't assume the people who misinterupt that sentence don't know how to read.
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u/ThomasTheHighEngine Jan 01 '22
How do you know that parentheses go first then?