re: #278 MsJ

I suck at math so I questioned myself. I asked my math-tutoring engineer husband and he said I was right. Then I look at Twitter and I was like FUCKING HELL.

Like 80% said my solve was right and 20% said the other answer was right. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That’s a sign that this isn’t really a math question — it’s a question about which rules are being used to deal with ambiguity. E.g., en.wikipedia.org

However, in some of the academic literature, multiplication denoted by juxtaposition (also known as implied multiplication) is interpreted as having higher precedence than division, so that 1 ÷ 2x equals 1 ÷ (2x), not (1 ÷ 2)x.

For example, the manuscript submission instructions for the Physical Review journals state that multiplication is of higher precedence than division with a slash, and this is also the convention observed in prominent physics textbooks such as the Course of Theoretical Physics by Landau and Lifshitz and the Feynman Lectures on Physics.