Post #4114461

@dgrilawidbanana@mastodon.social Welcome, traveller! I am a self-appointed SmartmanApps-watcher and you have joined the ranks of people who have attempted to correct him and got immediately blocked. Do tell me how you found your way here. This is interesting though: I've never heard him say before that his version of the distributive law only means you have to distribute "before removing brackets". That's not what he normally says as you no doubt knew (you must have read some of his other posts already?) The funny thing is that this weakening of his position undoes the reason he insists on this reading of BODMAS, which as that you *must* distribute before *division* so that 8÷2(4) is 1, and not 16. If you only have to distribute "before removing brackets" then the distributive law does not tell you anything about whether the following calculation is valid: 8÷2(4) = 4(4) there isn't any A in this expression, only Brackets, and a plus sign INSIDE BRACKETS he doesn't grasp that, until you have encoded operator precedence via BODMAS, "inside brackets" does not mean *anything*, and that the entire point of that precedence is to make exactly the choice of whether to first do something with 3 and 14, 5 and 3, or 5 and all of "3+(14)". He applies his learnt meaning of brackets to the expression, without understanding where that meaning comes from and that it's exactly the subject under contention. As such he does not really understand the role of order of operations and should not be teaching it, never mind harping on about it incessantly on the internet.