FACT CHECK 3/5

It’s only a matter of taste and how widespread a convention or notation is

The rules are in every high school Maths textbook. The notation for your country is in your country’s Maths textbooks

There are no arguments or proofs about what definition is correct

1+1=2 by definition (or whatever the notation is in your country). If you write 1+1=3 then that is wrong by definition

I found a lot of explanations online that were either half-assed or just plain wrong

And you seem to have included most of them so far - “implicit multiplication”, “weak juxtaposition”, “conventions”, etc.

You either were taught something wrong or you misremember it.

Spoiler alert: It’s always the latter

IMHO the mnemonics would be better without “division” and “subtraction”, because it would force people to think about it before blindly applying something the wrong way – “PEMA” for example. Parentheses, exponentiation, multiplication, addition

In fact what would happen is now people wouldn’t know in what order to do division and subtraction, having removed them from the mnemonic (and there’s absolutely no reason at all to remove them - you can do everything in the mnemonic order and it works, provided you also obey the left-to-right rule, which is there to make sure you obey left associativity)

parenthesis and exponents students typically don’t learn the order of operations through some mnemonics they remember them through exercise

That’s not true at all. Have you not read through some of these arguments? They’re all full of “Use BEDMAS!”, “Use PEMDAS!”, “It’s PEMDAS not BEDMAS!” - quite clearly these people DID learn order of operations through the mnemonics

trying to remember some random acronyms

There’s no requirement to memorise any acronym - you can always just make up your own if you find that easier! I did that a lot in university to remember things during the exam

they also state to “not use × to express a simple product”

…because a product is a Term, and to insert a x would break it into 2 Terms

A product is the result of a multiplication

The center dot also should not be used to mean a simple product

Exact same reason. They are saying “don’t turn 1 term into 2 terms”. To put that into the words that you keep using, “don’t use weak juxtaposition”

Nobody at the American Physical Society (at least I hope) would say that 6/2×3 equals one, because that’s just bonkers

Because it would break the rule of left associativity (i.e. left to right). No-one is advocating “multiplication before division” where it would violate left to right (usually by “multiplication” they’re actually referring to Terms, and yes, you literally always have to do Terms before Division)

÷ (obelus), : (colon) or / (solidus), but that is not the case and they can be used interchangeably without any difference in meaning. There are no widespread conventions, that would attribute different meanings

Yes there is. Some countries use : for divide, whereas other countries use it for ratio

most standards forbid multiple divisions with inline notation, for example expressions like this 12/6/2

Name one! Give me a reference! There’s nothing forbidding that in Maths (though we would more usually write it as 12/(6x2)). Again, all you have to do is obey left to right

Funny enough all the examples that N.J. Lennes list in his letter use

…Terms. Same as all textbooks do now

and thus his rule could be replaced by

…Terms, the already-existing rule that he apparently didn’t know about (he mentions them, and products, but manages to completely miss what that actually means)

“Something, something, distributive property, something ….”

Something, something, Distributive Law (yes, some people use the wrong name, but in talking about the property, not the law, you’re knocking down a strawman)

The distributive property is just a property that applies to some operations

…and The Distributive Law applies to every bracketed term that has a coefficient, in this case it’s 2(1+2)

It has nothing to do with the order of operations

And The Distributive Law has everything to do with order of operations, since solving Brackets is literally the first step!

I’ve no idea where this idea comes from

Maybe you should’ve asked someone. Hint: textbooks/teachers

because there aren’t any primary sources (at least I wasn’t able to find any)

Here it is again, textbook references, proofs, memes, the works

should be calculated (distributed) first

Bingo! Distribution isn’t Multiplication

6÷2(3). If we follow the strong juxtaposition convention, we must

…distribute the 2, always

It has nothing to do with the 3 being inside parentheses

It has everything to do with there being a coefficient to the brackets, the 2

Those parentheses are only there, because

…it’s a factorised term, and the opposite of factorising is The Distributive Law

the parentheses do not force the multiplication

No, it forces distribution of the coefficient. a(b+c)=(ab+ac)

The parentheses are only there to make it clear that

…it is a factorised term subject to The Distributive Law

we are implicitly multiplying two separate numbers.

They’re NOT 2 separate numbers. It’s a single, factorised term, in the same way that 2a is a single term, and in this case a is equal to (1+2)!

With the context that the engineer is trying to calculate the radius of a circle it’s clear that they meant r=C/(2π)

Because 2π is a single term, by definition (it’s the product of a multiplication), as is r itself, so that should actually be written r=(C/2π)

When symbols for quantities are combined in a product of two or more quantities, this combination is indicated in one of the following ways: ab,a b,a⋅b,a×b

Incorrect. Only the first one is a term/product (not separated by any operators) - the last 2 are multiplications, and the 2nd one is literally meaningless. Space isn’t defined as meaning anything in Maths

Division of one quantity by another is indicated in one of the following ways:

The first is a fraction

The second is a division

The third is also a fraction

The last is a multiplication by a fraction

Creates ambiguity since space isn’t defined to mean anything in Maths. Looks like a typo - was there meant to be a multiply where the space is? Or was there not meant to be a space??

By definition ab^-1=a¹b^-1=(a/b)