I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
Yeah, there’s a problem with some lazy textbook authors, which I talked about here. A term is defined as ab=(axb), and yet many textbooks lazily write it as ab=axb, which is fine if that’s the whole expression, but NOT fine if the expression is a/bc (a/(bxc) and a/bxc AREN’T the same thing!), and so we end up with people removing brackets prematurely and getting wrong answers. In other words, in your case, only n!=n(n – 1) and n!=(nx(n – 1)) can be used interchangeably.