What is the history of PEMDAS?

is a simple way to remember the Order of Operations.

The idea of PEMDAS has been around since as far back as the 1500s. They probably didn't call it that, because people had different words for almost everything back then, but it was mostly the same concept. The operations used in PEMDAS are grouping (or parentheses), exponents (some include square roots as well), multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. Some people will also refer to this as, "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" instead of just PEMDAS. However, there are some confusions. If, for example, you have a problem such as 18 divided by 3 times 4. It's not 18 divided by 12, but rather 6 times 4. Even though PEMDAS states multiplication before division, you would still do the division first in such a problem because you are reading it from left to right. The same goes for addition and subtraction. In Britain, they usually say "BODMAS" for Brackets, Order, Division, Multiplication, Addition, and Subtraction. Brackets are Parentheses, and Orders are Exponents, so the two acronyms mean the same thing.