We have all seen the internet memes and questions asking you to use PEMDAS to solve the question or riddle. I watched a friend of mine doing homework with her little one, and he kept questioning, ‘yes, but who said we must do it like this?” Yes, exactly; who said we must do it like this?
For those of us that went to school in the pre-PEMDAS era, this is just a shorthand for the order of operations in math. It is the same thing as BEDMAS, BODMAS or GEMDAS. It tells you what to do first:
- PBG – Parentheses/Brackets/Grouping
- E – Exponent
- M/D/M –multiplication/division
- A/S – Addition/Subtraction
Here is the mind-bender: It is not so much as PEMDAS being correct, as about PEMDAS being the standard. In South Africa, we drive on the left side of the road. There isn’t a right or wrong side of the road to drive on, but you can imagine what would happen if we didn’t set a standard.
Think of it as the language of math – so everybody that ‘speaks’ math speak the same language, and we understand one another. We are all consistently describing the concept. (Do not confuse this with math the concept. The latter is true no matter what, and we are making discoveries every day.) This way, we all understand the equations, regardless of where in the world we live.
So yes, in the 1600s, some mathematicians got together and said this is the order to solve an equation in and it became the standard (also called the convention). We don’t need to prove a convention to be correct; we just need it to be generally accepted as the convention.
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