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 originally had the same reasoning but came to the opposite conclusion. Multiplication and division have the same precedence, so I read the operations from left to right unless noted otherwise with parentheses. Thus:
6/2=3
3(1+2)=9
For me to read the whole of 2(1+2) as the denominator in a fraction I would expect it to be isolated in parentheses: 6/(2(1+2)).
Reading the blog post, I understand the ambiguity now, but i’m still fascinated that we had the same criticism (no parentheses implies intent) but had opposite conclusions.