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A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
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Those two things are memorisation tasks. Maths is not about memorisation.
You are not supposed to remember that the area of a triangle is
a * h / 2, you're supposed to understand why it's the case. You're supposed to be able to show that any triangle that can possibly exist is half the area of the rectangle it's stuck in: Start with the trivial case (right-angled triangle), then move on to more complicated cases. If you've understood that once, there is no reason to remember anything because you can derive the formula at a moment's notice.All maths can be understood and derived like that. The names of the colours, their ordering, the names of the planets and how they're ordered, they're arbitrary, they have no rhyme or reason, they need to be memorised if you want to recall them. Maths doesn't, instead it dies when you apply memorisation.
Ein Anfänger (der) Gitarre Hat Elan. There, that's the Guitar strings in German. Why do I know that? Because my music theory knowledge sucks. I can't apply it, music is all vibes to me but I still need a way to match the strings to what the tuner is displaying. You should never learn music theory from me, just as you shouldn't learn maths from a teacher who can't prove
a * h / 2, or thinks it's unimportant whether you can prove it.What fundamental property of the universe says that
6 + 4 / 2 is 8 instead of 5?
Nothing. And that's why people don't write equations like that: You either see
or
If you wrote
6 + 4 / 2in a paper you'd get reviewers complaining that it's ambiguous, if you want it to be on one line write(6+4) / 2or6 + (4/2)or6 + ⁴⁄₂or even½(6 + 4)Working mathematicians never came up with PEMDAS, which disambiguates it without parenthesis, US teachers did. Noone else does it that way because it does not, in the slightest, aid readability.