Thursday

Posted by Thomas Thu, 18 May 2006 10:30:55 +0000

I saw 5 separate Texas license plates on the way home from work yesterday.
I hit the $75 limit while pumping gas for the Yukon. Ouch.
What is -7^2 equal to? Please decide what you think the answer is before going on. I’ll wait.

Still waiting…

Still waiting…

Ok. Respond in the comments and don’t look down until you decide what the answer is.
The question here is the order of operations.

Posted in General | 7 Comments

Comments

  1. cole said on May 18, 2006 @ 3:09 pm:

    -5

    (but I cheated and ran it in Java :-D )

  2. Cole said on May 18, 2006 @ 10:20 pm:

    -49, if you want to get all mathy and stuff

  3. Marc Brubaker said on May 19, 2006 @ 12:08 am:

    49, there are no parentheses.

  4. amy said on May 20, 2006 @ 11:21 pm:

    well, without parantheses, -7^2 = -49.

  5. amy said on May 20, 2006 @ 11:23 pm:

    right – there are no parentheses. so the first operation to perform is the exponentiation, 7^2. then you multiply the answer by -1. =)

  6. Thomas said on May 20, 2006 @ 11:51 pm:

    so amy confirms what i thought (and explained to cole over im):

    i pretty much say that if you asked me, i would say 49 and assume that you meant to parenthesize the -7; but technically i think that it is -49, because there are no parentheses, and i assume that you can put parentheses around the 7; it is ambiguous at best, but i’m curious what people with math backgrounds think

  7. bigbrother0074 said on May 30, 2006 @ 4:58 pm:

    yea, i went w/ -49

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