6 ÷ 2(1+2) is going viral again. And the correct answer from a mathematician is “you need to write this better so it’s not ambiguous”.
PEMDAS/BODMAS is not some law of maths. ‘Order of operations’ are a convention to make writing clear. (PS The solution is always MORE BRACKETS.)
Also the answer is 1.
Ok, that was to wind people up. But I think the reason many people (who write equations regularly) get 1 is because the convention of ‘adjacent means multiply’ outranks “×”. Just like a fraction outranks “÷”.
Change it to 6/2 × (1+2) and now it’s 9. (By unofficial convention.)
In Excel on a Mac hit the command-⌘ key with 'right arrow' and you'll jump to the last column (I think Windows is Ctrl+Right). Columns count up alphabetically and you can check that "XFD" is 'Excel base-26' for 16,384 which is 2^14. Excel stores column numbers as 14-bit binary.
All of that said: I’ve not been able to verify that it was a column problem. Just that it was an issue with the limits of Excel. It’s a national disgrace either way, but if anyone has more definitive info please do let me know. matt@standupmaths.com
If anyone can record themselves signing "Total Ellipse of the Chart" (just that sentence, not the whole song) with music and send it to me within 24 hours: I'll put it in a video (iff it sounds not-terrible). matt@standupmaths.com
Note: I understand not everyone has the privilege of doing stuff like this for free, so I will happily pay. Or donate a commensurate sum to charity. I will also reply to this tweet if someone has done it to avoid anyone wasting their effort. I only need one version! Maybe two.
Ok, so 100% of the people who sent in quick videos of themselves singing have sung “total eclipse of the chart” when the actual requested line is “total ELLIPSE of the chart”. What do I look like: a solar physicist‽
We are all set-up to watch the launch and then hopefully see them fly over the UK skies 15-ish minutes later. But it seems the Florida weather needs to improve before the 21:33 BST launch time.
@Dr_Lucie Currently T-minus 25 minutes. We’ll hear at T-minus 20 if the weather is good enough to continue to launch. There may be too much ‘lightning energy’.
The “63” tells us that the system was probably using a 64 digit binary number. But instead of a normal number it would have been ‘signed’: meaning one bit is reserved to indicate positive or negative and the remaining 63 bits used for data.
Then something went wrong. A number was subtracted incorrectly, or inverted, rounded etc. No idea. But it ended up 10 off 2^63.
This is what that number of stations looks like in binary: