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
In: 6
Parenthesis or Brackets
The purpose is to group and create a higher order operation, so they need to go first since that’s their whole job.
If this were lower than it makes the problem harder because you have to add, multiply, etc over every term inside it.
Exponents
This is basically shorthand for self-multiplication, so it seems reasonable that we need to work it out earlier.
This could happen before parenthesis, but that get notibly harder to do. Could also happen after multiplication, but then if you divide first you’ll have to apply it to fractions which isn’t always fun.
Multiplication and Division
These happen together because they are similar but inverse operations; and because of certain properties of the operations they need to happen before addition and subtraction.
Addition and Subtraction
These can basically be done whenever, but because everything else was more important, they get shoved to the lowest priority.
In the end this priority is agreed upon because if you change the order, then you don’t always get the same result from the same equation everytime.
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