Kenneth Chang

It's not a question for mathematicians: there is no math in it, only elementary-school level arithmetics. The answer is 16. If it were 8÷(2(2+2)) then the answer would be 1. Yes, it's that simple.

If there were a rule that 2(4) had priority in the order of operations, would it make the calculation more interesting? No. No one writes the equation in this form, because it’s ambiguous. Write as a fraction, and there’s no ambiguity, and that’s a better option in every way.

There is no ambiguity about this. Just a lot of people who don’t know the rules.

Why should you have to remember stupid rules for a simple calculation like this? If you meant 8 — (2 + 2) 2 that’s what you should have written. The other form is just meant as a gotcha by being intentionally ambiguous.

Why bother to spell things correctly? Why bother to use proper grammar? Any of those can be called arbitrary, stupid rules. There's no real absolute reason to do anything one way or the other than to simplify communication, and the same goes for PEMDAS.

We put people on the moon with PEMDAS. We created artificial intelligence with PEMDAS. It’s more important that anyone seems to understand.

Just because order of operations is important doesn’t mean this silly math expression has any value. I tried to think of a real-world calculation where you would write down something like this and could not think of one. It is a creature of memes, nothing more.