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(media.piefed.social)
You got the wrong symbol in the headline, it should be >3
25 - ⁵/₅ = 25 - 1 = 24
If you wrote it vertically: 25 - 5 ————— = 24 5
But once you lay it out on one line, you have to use prins to prioritize addition / subtraction:
(25 - 5) / 5 = 20 / 5 = 4
Some YouTube mathematicians deep-dive into this.
The joke is 4! (Factorial) Is 24 so it looks right even if you do order of operations incorrectly.
Ok so I'm not dumb! Usually I am with math but I got this one. Go me!
Imma be weird and argue that the answer actually should be 4.
Dear Aunt Sally is great or whatever, but syntax also fuckin matters. We can all probably agree that the faster, more intuitive answer is obviously 4. Most of those in the western world (meme's largest audience) read left-to-right and there is nothing the delineate that division must actually come before inverse addition until one has carefully examined the entire the problem (which you should definitely be doing, dumb-dumb) and slapped on another layer of thinking (inefficient waste of time when doing quick mafs). Use the damn parenthesis, ffs!
Using parentheses where a few simple rules will do seems awfully inefficient. Both to write and to read.
Textbook authors be like:
sintx^2 + cosπx^3 - 3
5-5/5 != 4
4 != 24 but also
4! = 24
4! = 5-5/5
5-5/5 != Sandwich
Comment section full of people looking for an opportunity to argue
No it isn't
Yes it is
Wait, will this be the 5-minute or the half hour?
WHAT!
#DAMN YOU MATHEMATICIANS! YOU GOT ME AGAIN!!!
ASCII hack failure of language. Even in mathematics, ! has multiple meanings like with Boolean NOT. We need a science, math, and language reformation to remove non intuitive narcissistic names, and implied contextual meanings.
I believe you mean, "nice pun!"
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4! = ...Wait, that's literally the point of the post this time
I understand why this is wrong (order of operations dictates the division happens first, so it's really 25 - 1 = 24), but why is it funny? I don't mean "This isn't funny," I think I'm just missing the joke.
4! Is meant to be 4 factorial. 4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24
The fuck is a "factorial"? They didn't teach me that one in high school math and I couldn't afford college.
Factorial means n! = (n)(n-1)(n-2)... etc. down to 1, where n is a positive integer. It's used to calculate the different number of configurations of a set of elements, mainly in combinatorics.
Like if you have four different objects and you want to know how many different configurations you can order them in, you have four choices for the first object, then three for the second, then two for the third, then one for the final slot. So the answer is 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 = 4!.
What's the point of factorials?
They're used in permutations and combinations a lot. Combinations is pretty obvious based on the name. Given X things, how many ways are there to choose Y. Permutations are the same but where order matters.
For example, if you shuffle a deck of cards properly randomly there will be 52! possible orderings (permutations).
There are lots of applications, so I’ll give you three
Factorials are used in the Taylor Series to approximate trigonometric (sine, cosine, etc) and the exponential function. This can help speed up calculations.
In probability and statistics, if you want to find how many different ways a deck of cards can be shuffled, the answer is 52! Because the first card can be any of the 52, the second can be any of the remaining 51, and so on until the last card. Building upon this concept results in ways to model data like the binomial distribution , which is simply “how many successes will i get if i do this trial a certain number of times”. E.g. If I flip a coin 100 times, how many times will it be heads?
In computer science, the complexity of a program is compared to functions like the factorial, exponential, quadratic, etc. to visualize it’s performance given the size of the input, n. E.g. a program of linear time complexity is denoted as O(n), and as n increases, we expect the time for the program to finish to increase linearly. For a factorial time complexity, O(n!), we expect the time to complete to increase a lot compared to O(n)
Im sorry your highschool curriculum failed to teach you. I learned factorals in jr highschool
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Did nobody learn order of operations?
The meme is correct. It is 4!.
Yeah but it's playing on the idea that the reader would think 25-5÷5 is 4. That's the joke. Without it there's no punchline.
No no, they're saying "4!" literally is the answer. The joke is that you say 4!, the other person who presumably knows the order of operations assumes you got it wrong and did 25 - 5 = 20 ÷ 5 = 4 when really you do division first so the real answer is 24. The punchline is that "4!" is how you write 4 factorial or 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 which is 24.
Nothing goes over my head! My reflexes are too fast; I would catch it.
Yes, I understand that 4! is the correct answer. That is not my point. Without the misconception that the answer is 4, there is no punchline. This comic strongly implies that the natural assumption should be that the answer is 4, and that the secret, hidden answer is 24. In other words, in a world where people understand order of operations, the comic is not funny, because you wouldn't look at that and think 4 is a reasonable answer.
The joke relies on, as you put it, the assumption you did it wrong.
No the joke is that first think they got wrong, then realize it's a factorial so they got it right (the a-ha moment!).
Then we realize that they might not have gotten it because the wrong answer is 4 and they may not know of factorials.
The ambiguity is very clever. Some other commenters call it a pun.
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this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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