Viral math question divides the web and has even confused calculators

A seemingly simple math problem appears to have stumped every single person on the internet, breaking brains and calculators in the process.

The math problem was first tweeted out in summer 2019, with the request for “one of my mutual friends solve this.”

But this week the problem found new people to drive up a wall.

The equation is fairly straightforward at the start. But exactly how you solve the problem is not proving to be so direct.

Math equations are solved in a specific order of operations, which is taught as PEMDAS. That acronym stands for  Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction.

In American schools, children are taught to remember this with the phrase Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.

But apparently that doesn’t stick, because almost no one could figure out the problem’s real answer. It’s either 1 or 16, according to most replies - but those are very different numbers.

“I do parenthesis, multiplication, then division so i believe it’s 1,” wrote the original tweeter. “See so apparently division comes first......this is why I didn’t do well in math okay.”

People on the app chimed in to help, usually with quite a bit of patience.

“With my degrees I would say you were correct but there’s something you’re missing,” wrote one mathematician in 2020. “The ‘P.’ Parentheses are done first, including the multiplication of numbers attached. The way you did is also correct with current mathematics being taught incorrectly for years. #AmericanSchools”

“I have 2 math degrees,” another user replied. “It’s 1.”

Whether or not the answer is in fact 1, however, got so heated with the original tweet that the New York Times asked wrote mathematician and Cornell professor Steven Strogratz to tackle it.

“Deal with whatever is in parentheses first. Of course, 2+2 = 4. So the question boils down to 8÷2×4,” Strogatz wrote in 2019. “And there’s the rub.”

“Now that we’re faced with a division and a multiplication, which one takes priority?” the Times asked. “If we carry out the division first, we get 4×4 = 16; if we carry out the multiplication first, we get 8÷8 = 1.”

Strogatz, who previously complained on Twitter that order of operations never actually came up, had no real conclusion.

The person writing this story, meanwhile, has not done a math problem since roughly 2008, and has literally no idea what any of this means. In her opinion, the answer is like, negative 27, just because that sounds like a cool number.