what’s the physical meaning of mathematical operations?

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Let’s say you have a division. You’ve got 3/2, where 3 might be acres and 2 might be brothers so from there you could deduce that the division just means that the 3 acres of land will be distributed between two brothers. Summation and multiplication are quite straight forward, but what the hell does one do with multiplication and exponentiation? If I got 20 N-m of torque, wtf does the multiplication tells me there? If something follows a square root?

Please feel free to add any other operations to these. Thanks!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

“Order of operations” just means “when a problem is written down, you solve it in *this* order”. There is no “physical meaning”.

Sure, 3/2 could be used for “3 acres of land are divided up equally between 2 brothers; how much land does each brother get?” and the answer is “3/2 acres”, or “1.5 acres”. None of your other examples mean anything though.

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