this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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No mathematician would write an ambiguous equation like that.
People who argued over these are displaying an incorrect memory of a math education that is simply not a good look.
Division and multiplication have the same precedence, equations are evaluated left to right, so equation is divide then multiple. Division and subtraction are syntactic sugar for multiplication and addition.
These are fun little experiments showing how social media makes people more stupider and how proud the ignorant behave amongst themselves.
It also pulls double duty by making math look hard, ambiguous, and untrustworthy. Anti education, poor reasoning skills, and an implicit distrust of mathematical models and statistics.
Can you tell me a bit more about how you mean this? I searched a bit but only basic primary school level resources about the relationship between addition and subtraction came up.
Do you mean like subtraction is just adding a negative number, and division is just multiplication by the inverse of a number? In that case I don't really see how it simplifies things much because negatives and inverses still need as much definition. Or are you talking about bit-wise operations like a computer would use to do these things?
But hard to write this with the limitations of text but essentially it can be written as multiplication of fractions.
2 ÷ 2 ÷ 2 ÷ 2
2 x ½ x ½ x ½
Personally, I think the second form is easier to visualize and reason about, it can also can be simplified to use an exponent.
When you set up arithmetic from absolute first principles you typically say that there is an operation called addition, an operation called multiplication, that they are related by the distributive law, and then you assert that there are identities for these operations, which do nothing: adding zero does nothing, and multiplying by one does nothing, so zero and one are the additive and multiplicative identities.
Next you add that each element has an inverse under these operations. The additive inverse of a number is its negative, so the inverse of 2 is -2. The multiplicative inverse of a number is its reciprocal. The defining feature is that the inverses cancel the operation leaving just the identity, so 2 + -2 = 0, and 3 × 1/3 = 1. The exception is that 0 does not have a multiplicative inverse.
With this, the operation of subtraction is defined in terms of addition and additive inverse, and division is defined in terms of multiplication and multiplicative inverse.
Saying that one is "syntactic sugar" for the other is standard in higher mathematics, but of course you could go through the same procedure starting with subtraction and division, and defining inverses in terms of those operations - the result is no different. The reason starting with inverses is preferred though is because there are lots of structures which have an operation and an identity for it, in which you can ask the question "are there inverses" because inverses are defined purely in terms of an operation and its identity. You can't ask the question "can you divide in this structure" if the only way to even have a concept of division is to start with one.
This topic is the beginnings of abstract algebra which starts with group theory and builds from there.
It's not unheard of to find, in an exercise, "Simplify 4x²/2x". The answer is almost guaranteed to be 2x. (There are some interesting exceptions, but they're not really important). More often such a question would use fraction notation, but not always, to prevent exercises taking up too much space.
What's going on is that the multiplication of the 2 and x, because they are written without a symbol in between, is seen as morally being something you should do first.
And in such exercise contexts, it's unlikely to be misunderstood. But it'd still be better to be clear about it.