2023-08-28 06:25 UTC
2/6
So first I'll discuss a reference I did find, which relates to a letter from Lennes to The American Mathematical Monthly https://doi.org/10.2307/2972726. There's a lot to unpack, and the TL;DR is no, they did NOT change any rules, and this week I'll talk about left associativity, a mistake that I have seen people make in similar order of operations problems to the ones we have been discussing...
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@SmartmanApps@dotnet.social 2023-08-28 06:26
3/6 The problem in question included the expression +5-4+1. Left associativity means a term is associated with the sign to the left. i.e. 4 is associated with a minus, the other 2 terms with a plus. We have discussed previously that we can do addition and subtraction in any order, and this is true... provided you preserve left associativity! And one way to do that is always work left-to-right. But imagine we wanted to go right to left, and read it right to left! Then we would read it as...