this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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Yeah that was me, and now I made you suffer with me! Mahahahaaa!
But to be honest I found the whole thing quite entertaining. It's a puzzle working out what the hell he believes, because he doesn't actually have the level of awareness and understanding to state his position clearly. So every conversation he has on this it's five levels of back-and-forth before he reveals that actually he thinks that, in working out an expression like
a(b+c)the very first thing you must do is apply the distributive property to turn it into(ab+ac), because he has got it in his head that the term "multiplication" only applies to multiplication with an explicit symbol likea×b, and if there is no symbol he thinks it's completely different. Hence when order-of-operations rules say "multiplication" after "brackets" he thinks that does not apply to the aforementioned case. And then his lack of awareness comes in, because it's not just that he doesn't realise he's wrong; he doesn't even realise that nobody else is doing it that way.I'm still not completely convinced he's not a troll, but his dedication across platforms* to this one topic, and his lack of versatility as regards trolling on other topics, pushes it onto the side of sincerity.
*I googled his username and have seen him push this line on GitHub, math.stackexchange, and Mastodon - where he also has pet topics about how 0.999... ≠ 1 and how Cantor's theorem on the uncountability of the reals is wrong because, get this: infinite sets don't exist - both of these being more entertaining but worse in terms of disinformation
fuuuuuuuuck
infinity not actually existing gotta be the funniest of them all
Well, modern-day finitists, and through much of history many mathematicians, also thought that there was no such thing as "actual infinity" but only "potential infinity", so that it was illegitimate to think of "the entire collection of natural numbers" as a collected whole. But this isn't what he thinks; he's denied being an actual finitist. (He probably doesn't have the capacity to really understand the distinction between actual and potential infinity). He just thinks there's something special about sets which means they can't be infinite.
My guess is that in some textbook he read or used, it says words to the effect of, "we will only use finite sets" or "the cardinality of a set is the number of elements it contains", and has taken this to be gospel truth. This is, at least, what has happened with order-of-operations, where he misconstrues the statement about simplifying algebraic expressions, "first expand brackets" as being about order-of-operations. So he has form for treating sloppy wording as the word of God and ignoring any other textbook's phrasing.
In the case of order-of-operations I think this is because he believes with religious fervour that mathematics "is never ambiguous" and so the slight ambiguity between the two ways of calculating an expression like a/b(c+d) (namely: do you divide by all of b(c+d) or only by b) must be resolved by some rule, somewhere, and this is where he has found a way.