Eli5, people are saying that pemdas is absolute and that 1000 / 5(4-2) = m could be either 100 or 400 because the variable m isn’t defined. Could you all elaborate on what that means?
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There are some good answers here explaining why it’s ambiguous, but I just want to add that in any real-life situation you would have some more context to help you understand what the intended meaning is.
It’s perfectly normal in mathematical and scientific communication, including school textbooks, to have expressions that would be ambiguous if you removed all context. But there will almost always be some text explaining what the numbers and symbols are, and how the expression was obtained, and usually this will make it very obvious how to resolve the ambiguity. With memes like this we’re just given a bunch of random numbers and symbols with no explanation of what any of them represent. Not only does this make it impossible to be sure what the intended interpretation was, it also means it doesn’t really matter. I’ve no idea what m even means, so why should I care whether it’s 100 or 400?
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