• barsoap@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    Nothing. And that’s why people don’t write equations like that: You either see

         4
    6 + ---
         2
    

    or

     6 + 4
    -------
       2
    

    If you wrote 6 + 4 / 2 in a paper you’d get reviewers complaining that it’s ambiguous, if you want it to be on one line write (6+4) / 2 or 6 + (4/2) or 6 + ⁴⁄₂ or even ½(6 + 4) Working mathematicians never came up with PEMDAS, which disambiguates it without parenthesis, US teachers did. Noone else does it that way because it does not, in the slightest, aid readability.