There’s a reason why the conventional division symbol requires grouping its terms.
If you see an exercise like that, the exercise is bad and your teacher must be educated.
Comment on SBA #119 maths
FishFace@piefed.social 17 hours agoIt’s also because writing multiplication without a symbol creates a tightly bound visual unit that is typically evaluated before other things. If you see an exercise like, “what is 4x²/2x” most people answer “2x” not “2x³”. But this convention is rarely taught explicitly, so it’s ripe for engagement bait.
marcos@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
FishFace@piefed.social 14 hours ago
I’m talking about exercises in textbooks, and you can find enough examples that writing them off as “the exercise is bad” is not really a good enough response.
The only way the exercise is bad is if it causes confusion in the people who are using the textbook. Those students have been exposed to the conventions of the textbook in question; they’re not people who were brought up on some other convention. You do see inline division and the vast majority of people interpret an expression like that above the way I said, so it’s not in practice confusing.
It’s not realistic to demand that every textbook uses the same conventions. It is realistic to demand that they lay out such conventions explicitly, which they unfortunately don’t.
marcos@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
So what? Those books are bad, at least on this specific way. They should be fixed.
It’s perfectly realistic to demand that teachers only use good books. Textbooks should explain things, not confuse.
FishFace@piefed.social 13 hours ago
Well, you sure did repeat your assertion!
0ops@piefed.zip 11 hours ago
I think you nailed it on the head. The expression isn’t technically ambiguous, there’s exactly one solution, and neither is the notation incorrect, just unconventional. In this case though, forgoing convention makes the expression typographically misleading. Hence a reason why we have these conventions for writing out expressions in the first place: to visually reinforce the order of operations thereby making expressions as easy to read as possible. So it’s not written wrong per se, just unnecessarily confusingly.