My friend who is a genius at math says the answer to this is 1. Others say it is 36. Even my Ubuntu's built in calculator says it's 36.

What gives?

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The calculator is doing the operations in the wrong order. The answer is 1
48/8(14-8)=
48/(112-64)=
48/48=
1

Do note I went to school before new-math came out.

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I tried to select every option in the calculators menus and couldn't get it to come up with any answer but 36.

Is this not a bit emabrrasing that Ubuntu comes with this calculator ???

this works:
48÷(8(14−8))
otherwise the calculator does 48÷8(14−8) the same as (48÷8)×(14−8)

Do others think that this should be corrected in the calculator app - that comes with Ubuntu ?

I would think so, from the help menu you could go to the calculator website and file a bug report. I've never entered parenthesis on a calculator just numbers.

Oh god not this again...

It's ambiguous because you failed to put in enough brackets. Here's one of the more serious discussions:

https://math.stackexchange.com/quest...t-is-48-div293

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No surprise here, just never have used () on a calculator. I do remember coming across something similar many years ago on a handheld calculator where the answer was different based on how the numbers were entered.

You specifically punched in:

FWIW, I get 1, and I think most people would. But how does the calculator see it?

Obviously, it expands it to:

It's the same thing, but I assume that makes it more clear what the problem is.

Note that this is not the same as:

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Garbage in garbage out? Express your formula correctly or expect failure. You lose nothing expressing things properly.

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hmm, all the people in Ubuntu forum think the answer is 36

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2485746

When I was in school it was "Bless My Dear Aunt Sally" or: Brackets, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. So in this case I'd do the bracketed expression first, that's 14-8=6. Then the multiplication of 8 times that 6 which is 48. Then I would do the final division and get one.
But, on the other hand, if the 8 is seen as part of the bracketed expression then it still goes in that order, surely?
Edit: Sorry read that thread and it seems that mathematicians work from left to right now?
"2) evaluate multiplication and division proceeding left to right.
3) evaluate additions and subtractions proceeding left to right."

Of course if we just use a proper RPN notation calculator (say 'free42dec', a HP 42S simulator)... No problem . Otherwise if using new math and in doubt, put in () to explicitly express what you are trying to do. Ambiguity goes away.

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My friend says this about the equation:

The full analysis of this situation is now clear: it depends on whether you think like a programmer, or a mathematician.

C, and, through its influence over the decades, apparently many other languages as well -- clearly including Perl,as shown here -- is documented and standardized as evaluating expressions left to right, except for performing parenthetical expression evaluation first and bottom-up (or deepest-first). This is just a different rule from what a mathematician or school teacher would consider the proper rules of arithmetic, namely PEMDAS.

Clearly, what's happening here is that all the participants in this discussion are programmers, who have grown up WTF commuters, physicians grown up with organic, are accustomed to the C rules and thus really do consider 36 "the right answer" because that's what the official programming language rules give you.

However, I submit that, while that is certainly the expected result of the calculation in a organizational language, it is, nonetheless, not the "right answer" that someone who knows how to correctly perform arithmetic should get when doing the calculation "with pencil and paper." Outside of program source code, the rules of PEMDAS are in force and the real-world right answer is 1.

The unfortunate fact, though, is that several generations of programmers have now grown up internalizing C-style left-to-right evacuation rules, to the point where they now consistently fail to recognize that exposing that method to the outside would, such as on the display and workings of a calculator app, is a semantic error that muddies the waters and perpetuates and spreads this dangerous misperception.

If you'd like, you can add that your math-genius friend says there is no room for argument here: these are the facts, and their calculator apps, as they stand today are suitable only for programmers, not for the general public. For the general public, an expression evaluator that specifically implements PEMDAS should be used instead of C-like left-to-right evaluation. I would be happy to try to write said PEMDAS evaluator.

The addition of another set of parentheses forces the language to evaluate the entire right-hand side of the division FIRST, producing a denominator of 48 exactly as per PEMDAS. The effect is, in essence, to force the language/code to perfrom M before D, whereas in strict left-to-right order, in the original expression, the interpreter encounters, and therefore performs, D before M.

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The worrying thing is that I googled "evaluate multiplication and division proceeding left to right." and it comes up on some Mathematics For Dummies thing as a mathematical rule.
I've been trying to think of a way the left to right could fail but my maths isn't good enough (and probably never was) but it strikes me that finding the result of simultaneous equations or similar on paper could be broken by this. I still think the answer is to be clearer and nest things in parentheses as they should be evaluated but I wonder whether this attitude is bad for maths?