#bidmas

[chemboyfemistry]

When doing maths, always remember FEMBOY!

F unction

E xponent

M ultiplication

B reaking up

O pposing

Y ielding

[lthmath]

Writting Mathematical Questions

A while ago we have asked people on Facebook about one of those calculations questions that involves the order of operations. We are always curious what people think about this type of questions. Check out the post and the comments if you want to find out more: This is a type of question that is controversial just because of how it is written. Mathematics has a lot of notations and ways to…

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[betafreud]

you ever see a person and you think you might want to be friends with them but then you realize they use bidmas instead of the clearly superior pemdas?

bidmas? disgusting.

[nocontextgroupchat]

[midnightflaneuserie]

Not to rant, especially not about maths, but this is my one pet peeve about maths stuff.

So do you ever see those annoying posts (mainly on Instagram) where it has some expression like 8÷2(2+2) and then the comments are full of people going

"It's 1"

"It's obviously 16"

"Does nobody remember PEMDAS?"

"Actually you do the division first because BIDMAS"

"I learned it as BODMAS"

"Division & multiplication are actually equal. You should go from left to right"

Okay so leaving aside the point that it's meant to be vague on purpose so that the post gets more comments from an inane argument, it seems that people don't know why the calculations are done in a certain order, and that's totally fair because they weren't taught it! Multiplication and division are done before addition and subtraction because they're a repeated version.

2×3+1 exists as a shorthand to say 2+2+2+1, which is then obviously different to 2+2+2+2 if you did 3+1 first. Similarly, exponentials (or indices if you're so inclined) are repeated multiplications. I think it'd be harder to get mixed up with 2³+1 because they're not inline but I can see how you could get mixed up if it were written as 2^3+1.

The main thing that I want people to take away is that the only reason brackets aren't used in these cases is because they're a very widely accepted convention. BUT if there's any ambiguity, like 2^3+1 could possibly have, I personally would choose to write it as (2^3)+1 because maths isn't about following some arbitrary rules (well... it is, but it shouldn't be); it's about making it as universally understandable as possible. Yes, you could say read it left to right for the multiplication and division, but people used to other writing systems could be more inclined to read it right to left and I know maths isn't as universal of a language as it claims to be, but it should at least try. If there's any ambiguity in an expression, you use brackets!!

Also the ÷ symbol sucks and isn't even in the ISO (not that that's a comprehensive guide for all areas of mathematics, and it still includes "/" which doesn't solve the problem). Obviously with inline text you can't easily put a whole fraction but obviously that's the best way to write it, and if you can't do that, then use brackets djfhskdhksh.

Final point I wanted to note is that BIDMAS/PEMDAS is definitely a useful guide to basic mathematical operations but it will only take you so far. Which operation do you do first in a⋅b×c? It's the cross product, not because of an arbitrary rule, but simply because if you did the dot product first then you wouldn't actually have a vector left to cross multiply.

So yeah, ambiguous maths equations are bad :)

[alkaaliine]

Listening to weezer may make me a virgin.

Listening to radiohead may make me a virgin.

It cancels out BIDMAS.

[mathsteachertoolkit]

BIDMAS bingo

Here is a cute little game to use with a class as a bit of a competition. Players (or teams) take it in turns to create equations and connect 4 numbers. The students roll the virtual dice and then try to reach 4 in a row. Not only do students aim to reach four in a roll, they can block another student and prevent them from winning the game.

Up to 4 players/teams can be used, each with a different colour (very helpful if your classroom is set up in 4 rows or columns). You could challenge every student to come up with a sum and then select one student from the row at random. You could also ask a student from each group to create an equation that would be useful for them.

If you have the resources you could ask students in groups of 4 to play the game together. Alternatively engage in one player mode with each student finding their own answer using the four numbers that appear. A student could then be selected to share their idea in the hopes of getting to the answer faster than previous attempts. This means the entire class is involved and students do not wait during opposing teams turns. To introduce a competition element you could award a ‘trophy’ to the class who completes the game in the smallest number of turns.

This game may be a little time consuming with larger numbers of teams.so it is worth bearing that in mind when planning to use this. This is a very nice way to encourage students to think about BIDMAS/BODMAS/PEMDAS/ whichever acronym you prefer relating to the order of operations.

[doresworld]

So on Monday I got my English Reading test back and I got 100%.

Last night during Maths I got my BIDMAS test back and I got 89%.

(I keep wanting to be upset about my maths test because I thought I got it all correct but I made 3 silly mistakes) (I need to not think like this because it’s the highest score I’ve ever got in maths).