My mom’s a mathematician, she got annoyed when I said that the order of operations is just arbitrary rules made up by people a couple thousand years ago

I'm not surprised. Here's the proof of the order of operations rules. Also, the equals sign wasn't invented until the 16th century, so only 500 years old at most (the earliest references to order of operations are over 400 years ago).

I think I’m gonna trust someone from Harvard

So you're going with the appeal to authority argument - ok, got it.

But if you're gonna do that then make sure you check out Cajori's credentials, since that's, you know, who we both quoted.

argue with some of the actual mathematicians in here

You mean the dude who claimed to be, and was quoting wikipedia? BWAHAHAHAHA

but you’re supposed to read MD and as one step

You can do them in any order at all - M then D, D then M (hence the acronym BEDMAS), or all in one - what does matter is not treating Distribution as though it's Multiplication (which refers literally to multiplication signs), when in actual fact it's the first step in solving Brackets.

Sorry but both my phone calculator and TI-84 calculate 1/2X

...and they're both wrong, because they are disobeying the order of operations rules. Almost all e-calculators are wrong, whereas almost all physical calculators do it correctly (the notable exception being Texas Instruments).

You are saying that an implied operation has higher priority than one which I am defining as part of the equation with an operator? Bogus. I don’t buy it. Seriously when was this decided?

The rules of Terms and The Distributive Law, somewhere between 100-400 years ago, as per Maths textbooks of any age. Operators separate terms.

I am no mathematics expert... never heard this “rule” before.

I'm a High School Maths teacher/tutor, and have taught it many times.

Yes, good point - I'd forgotten about Unicode in this context.

e.g. you made a comment about teaching the "scientific" method to kids, and I can tell you as a teacher that we already do (but the OP never looked at any Maths textbooks, nor asked any Maths teachers) :-)

Yeah, I thought maybe you meant that, but I wasn't sure, and in any case I wanted to make clear it's totally worthless to use as a source for anything else (for the reasons I mentioned). :-)

Not sure how you came up with that conclusion. I never said anything about it being "just a blog post".

You said...

I don’t understand how the author of the post lands on “there is no good or bad way, they are all valid”

And I'm pointing out he arrived at that by ignoring what's taught in high school, which is where it's taught (not in academia). It's like saying "It's ambiguous if there's such a thing as rain" if you present weather evidence which has omitted every single rainy day that has happened. i.e. cherry-picking. Every single blog which says it's ambiguous has done the exact same thing. You can find what actually is taught in high school here

I've narrowed this down to using NavigationPage.SetTitleView and have created issue 21037, which has an 806issue branch in the repro repo.

you provided so many great references

Except for any actual Maths textbooks. Try this instead.

People get polarised because of wrong articles like this one. Read this instead.

written like this (÷) means it’s a fraction?

No, that means it's a division. i.e. a÷b. To indicate it's a fraction it would need to be written as (a÷b). i.e. make it a single term. Terms are separated by operators and joined by grouping symbols (such as brackets or fraction bars).

put the whole 2(1+2) down there, there’s no reason for that.

There is - it's a single bracketed term, subject to The Distributive Law. i.e. the B in BEDMAS.