P.S. show me where the squared is in...

you know, the actual topic, which you're trying to avoid because you know you are wrong

So when you sneer that rules and notation are different, you don’t know what those words mean

says the actual person who doesn't know what they mean 😂

when someone says ‘imagine a different notation,’ you literally can’t

Yes, you literally can't go rewriting all the rules of Maths that we've had for centuries just because you randomly want to do something different now that we've decided to add Brackets to it 😂 Your whole argument is based on pretending that all the rules of Maths were all written at the same time 🤣🤣🤣

Show me any textbook that gets the answers you insist on

Pick any of them which show a(b+c)=(ab+ac) 🙄

Social conventions are real, well defined things

So are the laws of nature, that Maths arises from

Some mathematicians like to pretend they aren’t, while using a truckload of them; that’s a hypocritical opinion

No, you making false accusations against Mathematicians is a strawman

That’s not to say you can’t change them

You can change the conventions, you cannot change the rules

But all of basic arithmetic is a social convention

Nope, law of nature. Even several animals know how to count.

you can redefine the numbers and operations any time you want too

And you end up back where you started, since you can't change the laws of nature

I mean, arithmetic order is just convention

Nope, rules arising from the definition of the operators in the first place.

not a mathematical truth

It most certainly is a mathematical truth!

But that convention works in the way we know, yes, because that’s what’s… well… convention

The mnemonics are conventions, the rules are rules

Some people insist there’s no “correct” order for the basic arithmetic operations.

And those people are wrong

And worse, some people insist the correct order is parenthesis first, then left to right

As per Maths textbooks

Both of those sets of people are wrong

All Maths textbooks are wrong?? 😂

And in some languages a number can be used as a name of a variable or a function

Not in Maths it can't

so it can be anything really

No, it can only be a Factorised Term, ab+ac=a(b+c). You also can't call a function by any letter that you've used as a pronumeral

That doesn’t prohibit them from teaching additional material

Correct, but it can't be something which would contradict what they do have to teach, which is what "weak juxtaposition" would do.

a single reference

I see you didn't read the whole thread then. Keep going if you want more. Literally every Year 7-8 Maths textbook says the same thing. I've quoted multiple textbooks (and haven't even covered all the ones I own).

mathematics is a science

Actually you'll find that assertion is hotly debated.

Skimmed your comment and it’s wrong

So tell me where it's wrong.

Let me know if you ever decide to read the article instead of arguing against an imagined opponent

There's nothing imaginary about the fact that he claimed it's ambiguous, and is therefore wrong. Tell me why I should read a wrong article, given I already know it's wrong.

So you are saying exactly what I said; people can misinterpret things that other people have written

No, I'm not. They're "misinterpreting" something that isn't even a rule of Maths. There's no way to misinterpret the actual rules, there's no way to misinterpret the equation. There's no alternative interpretations of the notation. Someone who didn't remember the rules literally made up "implicit multiplication", and then other people argued with them about what that meant. 😂

I only just found the thread yesterday. There's only 1 "interpretation", and the only back and forth I've seen about interpretations is about implicit multiplication, which isn't a thing, at all - it's people conflating The Distributive Law and Terms dotnet.social/@SmartmanApps/110925761375035558

It's not ambiguous. People who say it is have usually forgotten The Distributive Law or Terms, or more commonly both!

Seems this whole thing is the pedestrian-math-nerd’s equivalent to the pedestrian-grammar-nerd’s arguments on the Oxford comma.

Not even remotely similar. Maths rules are fixed. The order of operations rules are at least 400 years old.

mathematical notation is just as flexible as any other facet of written human communication

No, it isn't. The book "A history of mathematical notation" is in itself more than 100 years old.