I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the classic mnemonic I was taught at school - B (rackets) O (vers) D (ivision) M (ultiplication) A (dditions) S (ubtractions)
Which often gives the correct answer, but equally can give an incorrect one! As a programmer, the order of operations is usually dictated by the command I am using in the programming language, but complex nested iterative ifs require careful thought, I've found - and often the breaking down into parts solved first before continuing. John Coyle Brisbane, Australia -----Original Message----- From: PDML [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John Sessoms Sent: Wednesday, 10 April 2013 4:57 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Posting photos of street art can get you arrested From: Brian Walters > Quoting Rob Studdert <[email protected]>: > >> On 9 April 2013 06:30, John Sessoms <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Just out of curiosity, what real life problem does that equation relate to? >> >> In solving electronics engineering problems this sort of combination >> of operators wouldn't be that uncommon. >> >>> It's been long enough since I'd done school-book math that I had to >>> Google "order of operations" to be sure I got the answer right. >> >> After watching that FB thread I feel that I'm in a privileged >> position that my secondary schooling left me with an indelible memory >> of order of operations (and we had no swanky acronyms, we just had to >> remember it like times tables) plus I can solve trig problems so long >> as I have a table or calculator handy and logs are no mystery. I >> can't help thinking that if order of operations in second class >> mechanical maths is a problem what change would anyone have had with basic >> algebra? > > > > Yeah, I'm with John here. In my ancient schooldays, equations like > this would be presented with parentheses to define the order of > operations, as in: > > 6-(1x0)+(2/2) = 7 > > I'm not sure when the parentheses idea was dropped. > I recognized right away that it was one of those trick questions based on order of operation. I got seven as the answer, but wasn't certain enough that I remembered it correctly to accept the answer without Googling Order of Operation to check myself. When I had to take Trigonometry in High School it was all rote memory & looking up tables. They didn't teach WHY. I had to take a math course during one of my sojourns in Community College, and enough time had passed since High School that they taught Trig using graphing calculators. And in order to use graphing calculators, they had to teach WHY. Looking back, I can't believe that my High School Trig course never once mentioned that Sine, Cosine and Tangent are all based on the relationship of the sides of a triangle. That would have made it so easy. And again, if I actually needed to figure out the height of a flagpole from the length of it's shadow, nowadays I'd just Google it & find an on-line calculator that would give me the answer. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
