this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Mathematicians know wolfram is wrong and it was warned in my maths degree that you should "over bracket" in WA to make yourself understood. They tried hard to make it look like handwritten notation because reading maths from a word processor is typically tough and that creates the odd edge case like this.
1/2x does not equal 0.5x or it'd be written x/2 and I challenge you to find a mathematician who would argue differently. There's no ambiguity and claiming there is because anyone anywhere is having this debate is like claiming the world isn't definitely round because some people argue its flat.
Sometimes people are wrong.
Woo hoo! I hadn't heard of anyone else pointing this out (rather, I'm always on the receiving end of "But Wolfram says..."), so thanks for this comment! :-) Now I know I'm not alone in knowing that Wolfram is wrong.
OMG, I've run into so many people like that. They seem to believe (via saying "look, this blog says it's ambiguous too") that 2 wrongs make a right. No, you're both just wrong! Wolfram, Google, ChatGPT(!), the guy who should mind his own business, are all wrong.
Yes, they are... and unfortunately a whole bunch of the time they're unwilling to face it and/or admit it, even when faced with Maths textbooks which clearly show what they said is wrong.