People can be so narrow-minded.

[phoeny]

I'm sure it's making rounds everywhere but here's the meme in question:



And people are legit angry that it's either 1 or it's 9. I reblogged it with my explanation:

"LOL TROLLING. As a matter of fact, the equation above is ambiguous leading people to believe it’s either

(6/2) x (1+2)= 9

OR

6/ [2(1+2)]= 1

You know that illusion of seeing either a young lady or the face of an old woman? SAME CONCEPT."

Of course I read the notes, and all I'm getting is PEMDAS thrown at my face (The order of operations goes Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division, Addition/Subtraction).

FUCK PEMDAS, FUCK ORDER OF OPERATIONS. If people can't see that the lousy division slash and the fact that there's nothing to clarify the 2(1+2) makes the equation ambiguous then I have no hope for the math curriculum.

I'm not even a math major, but I wonder why people can't see beyond what they're told.

Comments

[zerrat.livejournal.com]

After staring at this for a while, I think I get it. It is rather ambiguously formatted. But I really, really don't understand maths, so the fact that I got it at all is an achievement here.

/struggled with maths all her life.

Anyhow, you're right.

[aznphoenixx.livejournal.com]

It is ambiguously formatted because people are still debating over it. And the point is that you can argue for 1 AND 9. Of course, people think it's math, therefore you must have one correct answer.

But it really depends on how you interpret where the 2 is grouped with 6 or (1+2).

I was awesome at math (oh the stereotype) until high school. I just stopped caring. *shrug* All my math teachers...didn't really explain enough, so I can understand the frustration. But in college I got a really good score on my math requirement (A-, equivalent to 88-92/100).

[meicdon13]

Based from what I remember of my math classes, the answer should be 1. IDK how it's taught elsewhere, but in my high school, faced with this formatting, we were taught to consider 2 to be grouped with (1+2).

[aznphoenixx.livejournal.com]

Personally I read the 2 as grouped into (1+2) so I got 1 as well. It's just badly written, in such a way that there is no universal right answer. Is the slash indicative of a division sign or a fraction sign?

I just find it annoying that some of the responses were "LOL PEMDAS. WHY SO STUPID? OBVS IT'S 9" and such.

[meicdon13]

AFAIK, the slash is for division. But yeah -- horribly formatted :\