This is quite possibly the best maths joke I've ever seen.
[edit] I guess it still can't beat the 'be rational' / 'get real' one.
You got the wrong symbol in the headline, it should be >3
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?
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.
Yeah and 24 = 4 factorial = 4!
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!
Following your logic,
2*7²+5*3³ becomes (2(7²))+(5(3³))
Talk about inefficient waste of time.
I find this to be unironically both easier to read (by an incredibly wide, dyslexic margin) and faster to write and type.
Parenthesis consists of only two symbols that only require two keyboard keys and a single stroke of a pen to write compared to the four keys and varying strokes of the standard operators (aka. more efficient). But, far more importantly for me anyway, "+", "×", "*", "÷", all look nearly identical unless I stare the keyboard or problem for an agonizing century (waste of time, perhaps?) and even then it's a mystery whether my brain processed the symbology correctly or put the numbers in the right spot to do math (yep, waste of time). The humble ( ), however, is very easy to see, and it creates neat little windows that don't leave much room for misinterpretation.
2*7²+5*3³ = accessibility nightmare
(2(7²))+(5(3³)) = readable with clearly defined order of operations
I did preface this by pointing out I'm weird.
Using parentheses where a few simple rules will do seems awfully inefficient. Both to write and to read.
Simple rules are only simple if they are intuitive and consistently applicable. Otherwise, they are nothing more than yet another thing to remember and think about, yet another source of error, and yet another possible point of confusion. With enough time/ effort, one can brute force the intuitiveness, but that doesn't automatically make the rule good or universally useful.
As a math teacher, I can assure you that not everyone has the same level of understanding or knowledge when it comes to order of operations. Some people struggle to remember the specific order, and mnemonics are worthless. Others struggle to read or visually process problems written with unclear or inconsistent symbology. Hell, most people don't even learn exactly the same fucking rules. Tell me, where is the simplicity in all of that?
When I teach order of operations, the glass eyes and exasperated sighs of frustration come out. But when I teach just the parenthesis and exponent stuff, lightbulbs and understanding. Suddenly, people "too dumb" to do 2+2 are doing algebra and getting excited about math for the first time ever. Some of this is certainly a failing of our collective education system, but we can't just forget that everyone has their own flavor of learning disability, neuro-diversity, and life experience. Simple rules quickly fail to be simple in the face of complex people.
I find it far more efficient to parse. I also put superfluous parenthesis in my code where I feel it helps readability.
It's something to judge on a per-case basis, it'd also work very well to use whitespace (i.e. 25 - 5/5 instead of 25 - 5 / 5). Of course you don't want to parenthesis everything but it can help a lot.
Textbook authors be like:
sintx^2 + cosπx^3 - 3
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.
Im sorry your highschool curriculum failed to teach you. I learned factorals in jr highschool
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?
Makes things shorter.
In the applications mentioned by other people, you run into calculations that would look really messy and confusing. Things like 5•4•3•2•1 can be shorted to just 5! Imagine writing the full version of 123!
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)
Aha! Got it, thank you so much.
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've never seen ! used for boolean NOT in maths, just ¬. I think ! is something programming languages went for because it's easier to type. That said, screw (a, b). Is that a (coordinate) pair, an interval, an inner product, some secret fourth thing? Who knows!
Inner products are written as ⟨a,b⟩, no? Fair point on the interval, tho
I believe you mean, "nice pun!"
4! = ...Wait, that's literally the point of the post this time
Memes related to mathematics.
Rules:
1: Memes must be related to mathematics in some way.
2: No bigotry of any kind.
