https://zeta.one/viral-math/

I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.

It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)

  • Aussiemandeus
    6·
    10 months ago

    I guess if you wrote it out with a different annotation it would be

    ‎ ‎ 6

    -‐--------‐--------------

    2(1+2)

    =

    6

    -‐--------‐--------------

    2×3

    =

    6

    –‐--------‐--------------

    6

    =1

    I hate the stupid things though

        • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.ml
          12·
          10 months ago

          Never mind, here’s another better way to do this:

          6⁄2(1+2) ⇒ 6⁄2*3 ⇒ 6⁄6 ⇒ 1

          Works on the web page, but looks weird on some mobile app. Markdown is a fucking mess. Some implementation has MathJax support, some have special syntaxes.

          • 💡𝚂𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗍𝗆𝖺𝗇 𝙰𝗉𝗉𝗌📱@programming.devEnglish
            1·
            7 months ago

            6⁄2(1+2) ⇒ 6⁄2*3 ⇒ 6⁄6 ⇒ 1

            You’re more patient than me to go to that trouble! 😂 But yeah, looks good. Just one technicality (and relates to how many people arrive at the wrong answer), the 2x3 should be in brackets. Yes if you had a proper fraction bar it wouldn’t matter, but that’s what’s missing with inline writing, and is compensated for with brackets (and brackets can’t be removed unless there’s only 1 term inside). In your original comment, it does indeed look like 6/(2x3), but, to illustrate the issue with what you wrote, as soon as I quoted it, it now looks like (6/2)x3 in my comment.

        • onion@feddit.de
          4·
          10 months ago

          Lemmy interprets some symbols as formatting commands, for example putting a # at the start of a line turns it into a header:

          ## header

          You can tell it to not do that by putting a backslash before the symbol:

          \# not a header

          The backslash is called the escape symbol.

    • Aussiemandeus
      3·
      10 months ago

      I guess if you wrote it out with a different annotation it would be

      ‎ 6

      –‐--------‐-------------- 2(1+2)

      = 6 –‐--------‐-------------- 2×3

      = 6 –‐--------‐-------------- 6

      =1

      I hate the stupid things though