this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Perhaps it’s not the most clear, but that absolutely is the standard convention for how to treat exponents, because it results in much simpler shorthand for writing things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series
Example on that page:
-x-(1/2)x^2 -(1/3)x^3 -(1/4)x^4 …
Using your definition you’d have to put a bunch of parenthesis: -x-(1/2)(x^2 )-(1/3)(x^3 )-(1/4)(x^4 )…
And believe me physicists would hate you if you made them do this because they’d have to do it constantly.
It's been a hot minute since I've had to do any serious maths, but that does roughly line up with what I remember about BODMAS. It's just intuitively, there's a difference between - as an infix operator (10 - 5) and - as a prefix (-3). If you where to solve x^2^ where x = -3, I don't think you'd say it's -9.