• DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I prefer BM-DAS, no one’s out here doing exponents, and no one calls brackets “parentheses”…

    • cobysev@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).

      Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.

      • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I’m a theoretical physics grad student and a night school maths teacher, I have never heard this distinction. People in academia around me call them round and square brackets.

        • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          It’s a US vs UK (and probably others) distinction. The ( ) are almost never called brackets in the US, unless it’s a regional thing I’m not aware of. Also the [ ] didn’t get used in any math classes I was in the US up through calculus except for matrices.

          • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Interesting! Nobody at my institute is a native English speaker. They’re from several European and some Asian and south American countries.