I confused social convention for human brilliance.
I love this post, so don't take this critique the wrong way (in fact, I might be wrong):
"Why do we evaluate arithmetic operations in the order we do?"
I don't believe this is a social convention. I believe the order of operations follows from our place-value system.
2,355 = 2(10^3)+3(10^2)+5(10^1)+5(10^0)
PEMDAS is what makes the value of a number. At least that's what I've been telling my students.
I love this post, so don't take this critique the wrong way (in fact, I might be wrong):
"Why do we evaluate arithmetic operations in the order we do?"
I don't believe this is a social convention. I believe the order of operations follows from our place-value system.
2,355 = 2(10^3)+3(10^2)+5(10^1)+5(10^0)
PEMDAS is what makes the value of a number. At least that's what I've been telling my students.