Existence Depends On Your Perspective

Student celebrates surviving calculus only to discover thermodynamics and fluid mechanics are waiting to crush their soul. Classic engineering curriculum trap. You think you've conquered the final boss, but it was just the tutorial level. Thermodynamics doesn't just break your spirit—it conserves that broken spirit and transfers it directly into anxiety. And fluid mechanics? That's just calculus wearing a trench coat filled with partial differential equations and boundary conditions.

The classic math progression that breaks physics students! First day: "Physics freshman life, here I come!" with all the enthusiasm of someone who hasn't yet encountered a triple integral. Then reality hits—Linear Algebra has you wide-eyed at 2AM, Calculus transforms you into a pillow-clutching zombie, and by Differential Equations, you're staring into the void wondering if that coffee IV drip is medically approved. The mathematical gauntlet turns bright-eyed freshmen into sleep-deprived calculation machines faster than light travels through vacuum. Every physics major knows that confidence evaporates proportionally to the complexity of the math!

The derivative of Johnny Sin(s) with respect to x equals Johnny Cos(s). Pure calculus poetry right there. Mathematicians spend years learning derivatives just to appreciate this level of humor. The rest of us just nod along pretending we remember basic trigonometry from high school. I've used this joke exactly once at a department meeting and still haven't recovered from the silence that followed.

The existential crisis of complex numbers in one image. When you're solving for time (t) and end up with an imaginary component (-0.5 + 2i), your brain starts questioning the fabric of reality itself. In physics, imaginary time isn't just a mathematical quirk—it's a sideways dimension that makes theoretical physicists wake up in cold sweats. Poor Andrew probably just wanted to calculate when two trains would meet, not discover a portal to another dimension.

Behold, the utopian future we could have had if humanity simply agreed on using periods instead of commas as decimal separators. No more spreadsheet errors. No more international finance disasters. Just sleek buildings, flying cars, and unified notation. Meanwhile, in our reality, engineers are still converting units because someone thought 12 inches in a foot was perfectly reasonable.

On the left: Beautiful mathematical definitions of e , the elegant constant that powers exponential growth and natural logarithms. On the right: "Interest paid daily" with pennies and tally marks, plus some fancy graphs that nobody understands! It's the perfect representation of math class trauma! Your professor: "Behold the transcendental beauty of e !" Meanwhile your brain: "Huh, so e equals... money and squiggly lines?" No wonder 2.71828... keeps going forever—it's trying to escape from our comprehension!