Tasty Trigonometry

The eternal struggle of finding complex numbers in the wild! These four brave mathematicians are desperately searching for the complex plane—you know, that mythical realm where i = √(-1) lives. The complex plane exists perpendicular to the real number line, but good luck explaining that to your brain that evolved to hunt mammoths, not imaginary numbers. Each panel shows a different search strategy: map consultation (classic), business casual reconnaissance, binocular surveillance, and the advanced "climb a ladder into the sky" technique. Still can't find it though, because turns out abstract mathematical constructs don't actually exist in physical space. Who knew?!

Those innocent freshman math majors reaching for the pretty "calculus is cool" flower while the train of Real Analysis barrels down the tracks! That's basically the math major pipeline in one image! 😂 First year: "Derivatives are fun! Look at these neat integrals!" Junior year: *sobbing over epsilon-delta proofs while questioning every life choice* The mathematical innocence never survives the first encounter with "prove that this seemingly obvious statement is true using only first principles." Trust me, we've all been that person on the tracks!

The academic food chain in its natural habitat! While physicists smugly cruise through life with their simplified spherical cows and frictionless surfaces, biologists are absolutely losing their minds over calculus. The dreaded derivatives and integrals appear as a terrifying monster to biology students who just wanted to memorize some cell parts and call it a day. Meanwhile, physics folks are like "Oh, you think THAT'S hard? I solved three differential equations before breakfast." The hierarchy of mathematical terror is real, and biologists are definitely at the bottom of this particular ecosystem.

Every physics student's nightmare in blue hardcover! Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics isn't just a textbook—it's an emotional rollercoaster with Maxwell's equations as the main villain. Those partial differential equations don't just calculate electric fields—they calculate how many hours of sleep you'll lose! The infamous "Jackson problems" have broken more spirits than bad lab results. Physics departments should honestly hand out tissue boxes with each copy. Rumor has it even Einstein would've needed a study group for this one!

When nature has already solved your packing optimization problem for 100 million years. The bee's hexagonal honeycomb design isn't just pretty—it's mathematically perfect space utilization. That 20.9° angle in the title? That's the precise angle in the rhombic dodecahedron structure of honeycombs. Watch as our bee protagonist evolves from disappointment at inefficient cylindrical designs to pure ecstasy at discovering hexagonal packing—the same structure bees figured out while we were still trying to invent the wheel. Nature's algorithms beat our best engineers, and the bee knows it.

The slide on the left represents the simple brute force approach to calculus - just plug in some big numbers and see what happens. The right slide? That's where mathematicians go to die, buried under pages of epsilon-delta proofs that basically say "this number gets really close to that number" in the most painful way possible. Meanwhile, finding the actual limit is the boring middle path that your professor insists is "elegant." Spoiler alert: after four years of advanced math, you'll still sometimes just use the calculator method when nobody's looking.