The problem is that you're thinking of BIDMAS as a set of hard rules, rather than the set of rough guidelines created in the early 20th century by one random teacher for the purposes of teaching 10-year-olds how to do the level of maths that 10-year-olds do.

This video and this one point to some examples of style guides in academia as well as practical examples in the published works of mathematicians and physicists, which are pretty consistent.

If you want to come up with a hard rule, doing BIJMDAS, adding in "multiplication indicated by juxtaposition" with the J, is a much better way to do it than what you learnt when you were 10. But even that's still best to think of as a handy guideline rather than a hard and fast rule.

[–] EndlessApollo@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

That's cool, but still wrong :3

No fr I had no idea that those acronyms weren't the whole picture, I just assumed some mathematicians a long time ago decided how that stuff should be written out and that BEDMAS/PEMDAS/whatever contained all the rules in it. Thank you for the info, Idk why this isn't more widely taught, ig because those acronyms are what all the questions are already written for? It doesn't seem that hard to just teach it as BEADMAS, where the A refers to numbers adjacent to variables

[–] SmartmanApps@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

It doesn’t seem that hard to just teach it as BEADMAS, where the A refers to numbers adjacent to variables

Terms already are taught!

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[–] SmartmanApps@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

Source?

Cajori (1928) for starters, plus any old Year 7 Maths textbook, any era (we know from Lennes letter that textbooks were already doing this in 1917).