Beyond PEMDAS: making sense of the arithmetic order of operations

Photo by Annie Spratt (Unsplash)

Many of us will have encountered the mnemonic PEMDAS, sometimes Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, or one of its synonyms¹ at some time during the course of our early schooling. These acronyms represent the arithmetic order of operations: Parentheses/Brackets, Exponents/Orders/Indices, Multiplication and Division, Addition and Subtraction. Half of us will have learnt the…