Mathematical sleight of hand at its finest! This "proof" starts with the innocent truth that 2=2 and then descends through a rabbit hole of increasingly suspicious operations with complex numbers. The punchline? Somehow 2=0.
The sneaky culprit here is the mishandling of complex numbers (those pesky i's). When we reach the step with i² (which equals -1), suddenly the math takes a convenient "forget everything you know about algebra" turn. It's like watching someone build an elegant house of cards and then deliberately sneezing on it.
Every math professor has this pinned somewhere in their office as a warning to students who think they can pull a fast one on their homework. Nice try, but we've seen this trick since Pythagoras was in diapers.