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How old is Sophia? šŸ§ 

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But maybe thereā€™s more to it than meets the eye. As soon as I saw the math problem, I knew there were probably tricks involved, because it seemed Too Easy. I also knew that if I attempted to solve it actively in this article, no one would ever take me seriously again, because my math abilities are abysmal. I would be laughed out of grad school, probably. Or something.

Thus, I turned to instructional videos from the interwebs. Why? Because if thereā€™s one thing Iā€™ve learned from the interwebs, itā€™s that if youā€™re having a problem with something ā€” anything ā€” someone else is probably also having a problem with itā€¦ and accordingly, theyā€™ve probably gone ahead and figured it out, making an instructional video documenting their solution as they went. So, yeah ā€” Iā€™ve been watching other people do math all morning. Itā€™s been great.

Now, before you join me in the wide world of online math tutorials, you should try this problem out for yourselves. Are you ready for it? Here it is:

Go ahead. Iā€™ll wait.

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OK, thoughts? Concerns? Did you get negative one? Did you get nine? Yeah, me too.

But weā€™re both wrong, and weā€™re wrong because of an acronym. Apparently, one common response to solving this problem isā€¦. drumroll, pleaseā€¦ PEMDAS. ā€œPEMDAS, duh!ā€ they laughed. Surely you remember PEMDAS? Dudes, I donā€™t think I knew PEMDAS to begin with, but apparently, it stands for Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally ā€” or, the slightly more helpful version, Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction, which is generally the ā€œcorrectā€ order of operations used to solve math problems. But not in this case! Following PEMDAS will get you negative one, which is incorrect.

But negative one isnā€™t the only wrong answer. Other people got tricked by the ā€œthree divided by one thirdā€ part, largely because they were too crafty for their own good. They neglected to account for the fact that, if you turn the fraction one third into 1/3, the /, mathematically speaking, is actually a division symbol. The result is this: