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 :)
I read the article, and it explained the situation and the resultant confusion very well. That said, could we not have some international body just make a decision one way or the other, instead of perpetuating this uncertainty?
It’s practically impossible to do that because (applied) mathematics is such a diverse field and there is no global authority (and really can’t be).
Math notation is very similar to natural languages what you are proposing is a bit like saying we have an ambiguity in english with the word “bat”. It can mean the animal or the sport device. To prevent confusion the oxford dictionary editors just decide that from now on “bat” only refers to the animal and not the club. Problem solved globally? Probably not :-)
What you can do/try is to enforce some rules in smaller groups, like various style guides and standards are trying to do. For example it’s way simpler for a university to enforce certain conventions and styles for the work they and their students produce. But all engineers in Belgium couldn’t care less what a university in India is thinking about math notations.
For real projects that involve many people there are typically industry standards that are followed that work a bit like in the university example and is enforced by the participants of the project.
There’s no decision to be made. The correct rules are already taught in literally every Year 7-8 Maths textbook.