I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
While I agree the problem as written is ambiguous and should be written with explicit operators, I have 1 argument to make. In pretty much every other field if we have a question the answer pretty much always ends up being something along the lines of “well the experts do this” or “this professor at this prestigious university says this”, or “the scientific community says”. The fact that this article even states that academic circles and “scientific” calculators use strong juxtaposition, while basic education and basic calculators use weak juxtaposition is interesting. Why do we treat math differently than pretty much every other field? Shouldn’t strong juxtaposition be the precedent and the norm then just how the scientific community sets precedents for literally every other field? We should start saying weak juxtaposition is wrong and just settle on one.
This has been my devil’s advocate argument.
I tried to be careful to not suggest that scientist only use strong juxtaposition. They use both but are typically very careful to not write ambiguous stuff and practically never write implicit multiplications between numbers because they just simplify it.
At this point it’s probably to late to really fix it and the only viable option is to be aware why and how this ambiguous and not write it that way.
As stated in the “even more ambiguous math notations” it’s far from the only ambiguous situation and it’s practically impossible (and not really necessary) to fix.
Scientist and engineers also know the issue and navigate around it. It’s really a non-issue for experts and the problem is only how and what the general population is taught.