It seems like Math is as ambiguous as anything else is these days. Last week a seemingly simple math question posted on Instagram started making rounds on across social media and now has gone viral.

Reminiscent of Blue/Grey Dress or Yanny/Laurel, The internet is ablaze with people eating themselves up over this riddle. Users from all walks of life are divide over the answer with some debates getting seriously heated on social forums. I tried to wade through the various arguments but Crazy math acronyms started attacking me from 20th century textbooks.. PEDMAS.. or is it PEMDAS.. or wait.. BODMAS?? wtf?

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It's not just contradictory youtubers and twitter handles that are knocking heads over this problem. Experts are getting involved, and still unable to clear up the confusion surrounding this problem.

Mike Breen, the Public Awareness Officer for the American Mathematical Society, (and whose job is basically to answer these kind of conundrums) told Popular Mechanics:

"According to order of operations, you solve whatever is in the parentheses first. That gives you 4. Then, in PEMDAS, multiplication and division take equal precedence, so you’d do the first that occurs from left to right. So you’d do 8 divided by 2 first, which is 4. Thus, it’s 16 according to classic order of operations."

"But the way it’s written, it’s ambiguous. In math, a lot of times there are ambiguities. Mathematicians try to make rules as precise as possible. According to strict order of operations, you’d get 16, but I wouldn’t hit someone on the wrist with a ruler if they said 1."

I know what I think the answer is (hint: it has something to do with the distributive property), but I'm going to wait and see what our readers have to say about it before chiming in..

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