Susan's Scribblings the Blog

We like puzzles, and to be puzzled. Or if we are easily ticked off and/or prone to self-induced blood pressure spikes, we like to argue until our faces turn plum about answering puzzles. A math question is the latest conversation spiker, following on the heels of the “what color is the dress” debate and the “laurel or yanny” sound bite.

The puzzle reads as follows:  8 ÷ 2(2+ 2) = ?

Depending on when you learned math, you might come up with two different answers. I had new math, so I would take the entire series of numbers apart and then give up. When I had new math and tried to tough it out, I spent my Christmas break catching up with 20 pages of homework I couldn’t complete because I was stuck. My mother, a math whiz in her day, approached the teacher, who admitted she had to consult her guidebook to help explain the solutions. So much for enriching young minds.

Anyway, one school (pardon the pun) of thought is that one performs the function within the parentheses first, so we would be multiplying 4 by the solution to 8 divided by 2. Since the solution to the division is 4, the final answer is 16.

But wait! If you learned to do multiplication first, you would multiply the 2 outside the parentheses by the solution 4 within the parentheses, making the final formula 8 divided by 8, which equals 1.

It’s the great pizza topping debate all over again, only if the wrong solution is reached in a math problem, it could spell disaster if you’re building or creating something in which accuracy is key.

I even learned about some new acronyms (or at least new to me), called PEMDAS and BODMAS. PEMDAS stands for Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. BODMAS stands for Brackets and Exponents, with the next two functions from PEMDAS reversed. These are guidelines for determining in what order to do a math function, and even they don’t agree.

We already have two of everything else that isn’t a Noah’s Ark animal, so why not two ways to mess up math? And worse, we have two more things to argue about.

We should be taking measures to stop polarizing ourselves instead. And we shouldn’t fight over differences which don’t directly affect the balance of our lives. If a math problem has two solutions, it is actually two problems, from what I can see.

But don’t count on that.