order of operations in different cultures? Are there any cultures or countries around the world that use a different convention for order of operations than the BEDMAS convention?  i.e.:


*

*Parentheses

*Exponents & Roots

*Multiplication & Division

*Addition & Subtraction

 A: I doubt such differences could exist in modern history after the introduction of compulsory school education (among other things that was one of the reasons behind the standartisation of mathematical notations).
The only case for such difference can come in oral tradition: recall the infamous joke about "two plus two times two". The Windows built-in calculator stil outputs different results depending on whether you use "standard" or "engineering" view.
Finally, it might be interesting to look into Polish and reverse Polish notattions. These notions refer mostly to computer theory, yet they are still relevant.
A: In Polish notation, operations proceed the operands. When you have a binary operation, you write the operation character and then both operands. I'm not sure if Polish notation also has any unary operations but if it does, then you would probably write that operation character followed by one operand. Polish notation is so unambiguous even though it has no parenthesis characters in the first place, so there's no need to introduce order of operations. I suppose Polish notation is used in Polish schools. If so, I'm hoping that they aren't trying to impose more material on the students and teach them short hand for Polish notation like we're doing here when we omit Parentheses because when students are taught too much too fast, they learn less and by not teaching that, more other material can be taught without teaching them too much. I don't think they would because Polish notation already has no parenthesis characters. Whereas here we would write (x × y) + (z × w) as x × y + z × w, in Polish notation, it would be written + × x y × z w. In my opinion, it would be very silly if people who use Polish notation started informal writing and wrote × x + y × z w to mean + × x y × z w. It should be people's own job to be clear what they mean and if they mean + × x y × z w, actually write + × x y × z w.
Source:


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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation
A: One culture is that or array programming languages (APL, J, k/q, BQN) where the order of operations is always right-to-left (unless overridden by parentheses). This is actually a small but crucial aspect of the languages' design. Ken Iverson's Turing Award lecture Notation as a Tool for Thought, available at https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm, provides much of his rationale for this choice.
