I know some places use BIDMAS as well. Overall though, to someone who knows little about mathematics, why is this the correct order? What’s the exact logic behind it
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Parentheses have to go first, because otherwise there’d be no reliable way to indicate when you want readers to do the operations in a particular order. For example, if it were MPEDAS, you wouldn’t be able to tell someone to add two to three and then multiply by five, because in (2+3)×5, the multiplication would have to be done before the addition.
Other than that, it doesn’t matter the order so long as everyone agrees what it is. We need to use the same order so you can know in advance how people will interpret the mathematical expression you’re writing. But if we’d all agreed to use PADMES instead, that’d work equally well.
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