After over half a million comments on Facebook and a toxic cloud of insults about elementary education, order of operations, and the intellect of a lamppost, the algebra challenge that supposedly shook the web last week actually has a solution. What causes so much confusion is replacing numbers with objects, in this case the combination "horses-boots-horseshoes". Let's take a look.
Define the square root of -1. Present a division by zero. For the first point, most of our readers would simply say "i and -i", and for the second, I imagine they would want to send me to a place where the sun never shines, which we can't reproduce for various reasons, while writing "indeterminate" on the page. These are just two examples of mathematical "problems"... but the ones that appear on social media tend to be simpler. The real issue is that they bring out the worst in human nature (just like many other things on social networks, obviously), and leave it clear that education systems around the world are not uniform. From the demonic "Common Core" to the two main interpretations of PEMDAS ("linear" or "real"), the only thing left after the chaos is the essential reason why most people hate math, and forget about it once they leave school.
The latest "algebraic annoyance" came through Facebook, generated more than half a million comments, and as expected, placed Homo Sapiens at the same level as the Neanderthal. This isn't because many people got the result wrong (making mistakes in any learning process is not bad), but because of the reactions of everyone else to those errors. Let's cut to the chase: Horses, boots, and horseshoes. The final result of the exercise is 21. Three horses equal 30, one horse plus two pairs of horseshoes equals 18, a pair of horseshoes minus a pair of boots gives 2. And at the end we have a single boot, plus a horse multiplied by a single horseshoe.
30 divided by three identical horses assigns a value of 10 to each horse. Then we subtract the value of a horse (10) from 18, and we're left with 8, which divided by two equal pairs of horseshoes confirms that each pair of horseshoes is worth 4. If a pair of horseshoes is 4, what number must we subtract from 4 to get 2? That number is 2, and by extension, the pair of boots equals 2. Finally, we find a single boot (1), plus a horse (10), multiplied by a single horseshoe (2). The order of operations demands that multiplication be solved first, therefore: 1 + 10 x 2 = 21. Google agrees, and WolframAlpha does too. A humble suggestion: Stay away from those algebraic memes. The toxicity of the comments makes Chernobyl look like Disneyland.
