I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
Yeah, and when you read a paper that contains math, you won’t see a declaration about what country’s notation is used for things that aren’t defined. So it’s entirely possible that you don’t know how some piece of notation is supposed to be interpreted immediately.
Of course if there’s ambiguity like that, only one interpretation is correct and it should be easy to figure out which one, but that’s not guaranteed.
Not hard to work out. It’ll be , for decimal point and : for division, or . for decimal point and ÷ or / for division, and those 2 notations never get mixed with each other, so never any ambiguity about which it is. The question here is using ÷ so there’s no ambiguity about what that means - it’s a division operator (and being an operator, it is separating the terms).