How It Feels Responding To "What Is A Semigroup?" With "An Associative Magma"

The recursive mathematical definition rabbit hole strikes again! This meme perfectly captures the mathematician's version of explaining something simple with something even more complicated.

For the uninitiated: a semigroup is indeed an associative magma (a set with a binary operation), and a monoid is literally a semigroup with identity. So answering these questions this way is technically correct—the best kind of correct—but hilariously unhelpful!

The emotional journey from smug satisfaction (top left) to confused crying (top right) to exasperated explanation (bottom left) to smug satisfaction again (bottom right) is the exact cycle mathematicians go through when they realize they've explained something using terms that require even more explanation. It's abstract algebra inception!