Multiplication Is An Illusion

The evolutionary scale of math education channels! From the primordial Vsauce (interesting but chaotic), to the more advanced Kurzgesagt (prettier visuals, cleaner explanations), to the enlightened Veritasium (deeper dives with experimental proof)... and then there's 3Blue1Brown, where your brain literally transcends the mortal plane. Grant Sanderson's animations don't just explain math—they inject it directly into your neurons until you hallucinate in linear algebra. Students who watch his videos either emerge understanding eigenvectors or believing they've glimpsed the mathematical structure of reality itself. The rest of us just pretend we followed along.

Benjamin Franklin is silently judging everyone who gets this wrong. The store lost $100, not $130 or $70 or whatever creative accounting people are attempting. It's a simple conservation of currency problem—the kind of thing that makes mathematicians drink heavily after grading exams. The thief walks away with $30 cash plus $70 in goods, totaling exactly $100 of ill-gotten gains. The store's register is down one Benjamin. Basic arithmetic shouldn't require a PhD, yet here we are.

When you're a scientist trying to escape the clutches of the normal distribution curve! That beautiful bell-shaped tyrant follows you EVERYWHERE with its 68-95-99.7 rule. You think you've collected random data? NOPE! Look again—the normal distribution found you, just like it found Spider-Man! The statistical universe is basically saying "I am inevitable" in math language. Even superheroes can't escape from being approximately 34.1% away from the mean!

Engineering students sobbing their way through partial differential equations while art majors watch movies? Yep, that's college in a nutshell! The Navier-Stokes equations are basically the final boss of fluid dynamics - they describe how viscous fluids flow and are notoriously difficult to solve analytically. Meanwhile, art students get to analyze Ryan Gosling dancing with Emma Stone. The mathematical trauma is real! Those equations govern everything from blood flow to weather patterns, but good luck solving them without having an existential crisis in your car first. Engineering degree = tears with mathematical notation.

The ultimate reaction to discovering that March 14th isn't just any day—it's Pi Day! That moment when you realize the cake isn't just delicious, it's mathematically delicious! First we have a regular cake slice (yum), then the mathematical symbol for "is an element of" (getting warmer), and finally—THE HOLY GRAIL—a Pi-shaped cake that would make any math teacher weep with joy! The progression from "oh, dessert" to "WAIT, IS THAT A PI SYMBOL?!" captures that beautiful explosion of nerdy excitement we all feel when math and food collide in perfect harmony. Who needs a birthday when you can celebrate the infinite, irrational, and absolutely delectable 3.14159...

The infamous "spherical cow" approximation in action. Physicists are notorious for simplifying complex systems to make the math work. "Consider a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum with no friction..." is basically our version of "once upon a time." Sure, the model's completely unrealistic, but the equations are so elegant that way. Who needs details when you can have solvable differential equations?