Google’s recommendation algorithm has been trying to get me interested in this clickbait for a while. Most recently via Fox News, but via some other meme aggregator before that. And I remember when “8÷2(2+2)” was spelled “6÷2(1+2)” (2016), and before that “48÷2(9+3)” (2011), and before that… well, there’s nothing new under the sun. This evening my uncle forwarded it to the math majors in the family, so I figured I might as well put my response in a blog post and link to it.

The answer to a mathematician would be “1” — because \(2(2+2)\) is \(2\cdot 4\) is 8, and then \(8\div 8\) is 1.

However, there are two differences going on here between “blackboard math” and “computer-program math.” One is that computer programs like Excel don’t use the \(\div\) symbol for division; they use forward-slash. Two is that most computer programs (definitely including Google Sheets; I can’t speak for Excel itself) don’t treat expressions like 2x or 2(x+1) as multiplication. You’d have to insert a multiplication operator, i.e., 2*x or 2*(x+1).

So when you ask “what is \(8\div 2(2+2)\)”, you’re implicitly asking “what would a human make of this sequence of symbols,” to which the answer is “eight divided by eight, i.e., one.”

Where it gets its “confusion factor” from is that there are a lot of people out there who I guess can’t do math in their heads, so they try to cobble together a way to get the computer to compute \(8\div 2(2+2)\) for them… and then they have to deal with the two quirks above. They’ll likely deal with it by changing \(\div\) to /, and inserting * between the \(2\) and the \((2+2)\). But when you change the sequence of symbols, you change the sequence’s meaning!

If you ask a computer programmer to evaluate 8/2*(2+2), they’ll say it’s (8/2)*(2+2) is 4*4 is 16, because that’s how the associativity and precedence of the / and * operators works. (In most languages, anyway. See below!) If you ask a mathematician to evaluate \(8/2\ast(2+2)\), they’ll probably ask what operation is represented by \(x\ast y\) — and when you say “multiplication,” they might concur that the answer is 16, but they’ll encourage you to rewrite the expression in some clearer form, such as \(\frac{8}{2}\cdot(2+2)\), if that’s really what you meant to express.

Communicating badly and then acting smug when you’re misunderstood is not cleverness.

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By the way…

In the programming language APL, concatenation means literal concatenation; so 8÷2(2+2) is 8÷(2 4) is 4 2 — that’s a vector of two elements. Meanwhile, in APL, * means exponentiation, not multiplication, and / means replication, not division; so 8/2*(2+2) is (2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2)*4 is 16 16 16 16 16 16 16 16. You’re welcome.

Wolfram Alpha — another computer program designed by mathematicians — takes the middle route. As of this writing, it interprets 8÷2(2+2) as \(\frac{8}{2}(2+2)\) (that is, 16); but it explicitly shows you that it’s rewriting the expression as \(\frac{8}{2}(2+2)\) in order to make sense of it, and (because it’s interactive) gives you a chance to rewrite the expression if that’s not what you intended. Exactly the way a mathematician might!