This viral math problem was tweeted for the first time back in 2019, with the request for “one of my mutual friends solve this.”
However, more and more people are determined to solve it.
Though it appears to be a very simple question, it is the solving part that has left Twitter banging heads.
In schools around the world, children are taught to remember this with the phrase Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally.
Whether or not the answer is in fact 1, however, got so heated with the original tweet that the New York Times asked Cornell professor Steven Strogatz to tackle it.
“Deal with whatever is in parentheses first. Of course, 2+2 = 4. So the question boils down to 8÷2×4,” Strogatz wrote in 2019. “And there’s the rub.”
Strogatz, who previously complained on Twitter that order of operations never actually came up, had no real conclusion.
