this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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It's interesting that you can somewhat tell where you are from based on this, I learned it as BODMAS
O - oxponent?
Orders.
Brackets, Orders (powers and roots), Division, Multiplication, Addition, and Subtraction
This is fucking so many people over... It should be limited - like Orders - to only Multiplication and Addition.
Because division is the same operation as multiplication, and subtraction is the same operation as addition, and they have the same "weight" in the order of operations (meaning, you do them left-to-right).
Another commenter mentioned something similar, how they're interchangeable, but I'm not sure why you say it's fucking people over.
Because the people who learn "DM" or "MD" then spend hours online arguing that you must do one before the other.
People do be arguing, lol
Did you mean MD and DM?
Yeyeye, sorry, long day.
Because you don't want people to know when to do Division and Subtraction? 😂
No it isn't, but they are both binary operators.
And where are they going to do Division and Subtraction in the left to right if you've left them out? 🙄
Because division is multiplication, and subtraction is addition.
2/2is the same as2*½2-2is the same as2+(-2)Well, as I already said multiple times: Division = Multiplication and Subtraction = Addition, therefore they would be doing them together, left to right. As in:
9-3+2would not confuse anyone who learned "Addition → Subtraction", as it does right now.No it isn't.
And you still have to do both
They're equal in value, they're not the same
You got that the wrong way around. Brackets have only been used in Maths for a few centuries now
And you were wrong every time you said it.
Not if you left them out of the mnemonic and they didn't know when to do them
Yes, it is.
Quote the part where I said you didn't.
They are the same.
No, they're not.
Mnemonic without understanding what you're doing doesn't help. Which is why people get confused and argue online that you must do addition before subtraction, or the other way around, depending on what the mnemonic they learned was.
Understanding that subtraction is just the addition of a negative number solves this problem.
To the Order of. 2² is 2 to the order of 2
I learned BODMAS too! It seems BIDMAS is another one (British I think), PEMDAS is the weird American one, BEDMAS is a thing too. You're able to vary the first letter (parenthesis or brackets), second letter (indices/exponent/"order" or "operation"), and the order of multiplication/division (MS or SM) and addition/SUBTRACTION (AD or DA)
Very interesting indeed.
We need a super position of all of them.
Where are pemdas and bodmas users from?
Pemdas, USA. Bodmas, UK.
BEDMAS, Canada
I think most former British colonies use BODMAS
But the USA seems to use PEMDAS? I'm confused now...
They mean Commonwealth countries more precisely
Yeah, my bad
It talks about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations#Mnemonics