to think that BODMAS/BIDMAS is a pile of pish devised to keeps children busy?

[duchesse]

And designed to palliate poor notation.

I see about 6 threads a week from parents baffled by their children's homework. It puts me in a rage. If I'd written such poorly punctuated sums out as the ones these beleaguered parents are having to deal with when I was back at school I'd have been in detention every week. Yet these are inexplicably set as homework.

Can anybody tell me if learning these stupid rules (rather than learning proper notation including brackets from the get-go) can actually help children at all in any way? Or is it, as DH suspects, merely a nifty way of generating activities that can easily be marked? DH has an Oxbridge degree in maths and Phd in phsyics btw and also cannot see why the feck this is being taught.

Thank you all....

but the point is I supppose that brackets make it all so much simpler.

Ah thanks Penelope I was just about to post that I learnt it a PEMDAS 30 yrs ago (in the us) and was thinking I've had it wrong all these years.

Last year, I saw a facebook comment war over whether PEMDAS or BIDMAS was right! The oafs went to the extent of patronising each other by listing what their preferred acronym stood for (Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction) and (Brackets, Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction) and still didn't realise they were talking about the same thing.

It was soul-destroying to watch, yet weirdly mesmerising.

I am an Oxford mathematician, and can assure you that BODMAS is very useful even at degree level.
Dh also used BODMAS in his Oxford Chemistry degree, plus his DPhil (which is the Oxbridge term for PhD) in Physical Chemistry too.

If you have to go left to right, you can end up with brackets galore-and anyway in that case you're still applying Bodmas to do brackets first.

If you didn't have Bodmas, then you would still have to a rule that everyone goes by convention (ie left to right) otherwise you can end up with different answers which is ridiculous (unless you're solving quadratic equations-or above) and personally I find Bodmas as intuitively obvious as you think it's obvious to go left to right.

In fact I found the idea of going left to right in writing strange, and had to be told that right to left was not the conventional way of doing it.

It's not really even anything to understand. It's just a rule to remember and apply.

What a weird thread. Your husband has forgotten he once had to learn how to decide which parts of equations to solve first...when you do it a lot it just becomes automatic. But without practice how are the kids supposed to get to that point?

If you had ever worked with complex algebraic formulae or written computer programs to do calculations you'd see how ridiculous writing every formula out with brackets in every possible place where there could be confusion would be. It would be like always using " I am" instead of I'm or "do not" instead of "don't" in English.

Soo where is duchesse?

I'm 40+ and have an A at O-level maths (back when there were proper exams) and I'd never heard of this bodmas malarky until DD started school. DH, who is a rocket scientist, believes I found my O-level certificate in the bottom of a cornflake packet.

To be fair hedgehogsdontbite you were probably taught as in the correct order to complete calculations without the BODMAS part being pointed out. It's just a method to help people remember the order - I doubt many of my top set consciously (sp?) think of BODMAS when doing sums as they know the order to do them in so is probably been forgotton as a seperate part of maths, my bottom set will apply it everytime!

I got an a in a level maths over 20 years ago but I don't think I've ever heard of it!

I left school 40 years ago and although we didn't have BODMAS we were definitely taught an order of operations.

Oxbridge is merely a shorthand to protect our privacy. There aren't all that many kicking around and we live in a "small" area.

DH is not a teacher, he is a research scientist. He does not and has never used BODMAS to his memory and yet he uses maths (and yes, the really complicated stuff, not the arithmetic!) daily, and favours the use of brackets for clarity.

So he would write E=m(c2) rather than use BODMAS and write E=mc2?
I seriously doubt it.

If he has substituted numbers into a simple quadratic equation at any point in his life he will have used the correct order of operations which is the correct name for BODMAS/BIDMAS.

I am pretty certain on his way to gaining his Maths degree and PhD he would have done this. I know I did during my Maths degree.

He may favour brackets but in simple maths he is adding in additional notation which is not required. In more complex calculations it may make life easier but in basic stuff learing the correct order of operations makes life a lot easier as for those who struggle with maths extra notation increases the belief they are going to get things wrong.

It's not fun trying to type equations into mumsnet so found a link instead - not a lot of unnecessary brackets here.

Surely he wouldn't use brackets instead of just assuming that everyone knows the order of operations (ie BODMAS or some other shorthand).

We called it Order of Operations when I was at school, but it worked just the same. Very handy in my career.

He might not have learnt it as BODMAS but you can bet your arse he uses the concepts it describes, without thinking.

Just to query mathematical language - I was taught (many years ago) that 'sum' meant 'add' and wasn't to be used for every type of calculation.

Is that not taught today?

Duchesse then he is lying to you.

He may forget the simplicity, he may consider it almost subconscious but he does use BIDMAS somewhere.

I cannot believe he substitutes into anything and puts brackets on everything.

The top line of the quadratic equation would become this when

-(b)+(square root ((b^2)-(4ac)))

Wheras normally it's - b+square root (b^2 - 4ac)

I know which one I find easier.

It is taught, but it's used so often outside the classroom to mean calculation, rather than just addition, that some children will use it incorrectly anyway.

I'm 42 and learned BIDMAS at school. I use Excel every day and it's brackets all the way but it's a right faff to work things out. I think BIDMAS is way more straightforward for a kid.

I grew up in Foreign and was educated in the 80s and 90s - we didn't use acronyms or mnemonics but the order of operations was considered fundamental and basic maths. It's part of the language - Thr syntax of mathematics - which is both vital and kind of lovely.

I'm 47 and had never heard of BODMAS until reading it on MN - but knew and learnt it as Order of Operations, so knew which order things needed to be done in.

Kim, I knew it (maths teacher!)