The New Pope Has Sine Of Greatness

The innocent confidence of youth meets one of math's greatest unsolved mysteries! This masterpiece shows what happens when a second-grader discovers the Collatz Conjecture (that pesky 3n+1 problem) and immediately thinks "I can totally crack this with my multiplication tables and Superman's help!" For the uninitiated, the Collatz Conjecture is this deceptively simple math problem that's stumped professional mathematicians for decades: take any positive integer, if it's even, divide by 2; if odd, multiply by 3 and add 1. Repeat until you reach 1. The conjecture claims you'll always eventually reach 1, but nobody's been able to prove it works for ALL numbers! The footnotes absolutely kill me - especially calling in Superman as a co-author because "he has loads of powers" and the keywords including "Minecraft" and "my brother Oscar from college who isn't my brother." Pure second-grade research paper gold! 😂

Nothing triggers a mathematician's fight-or-flight response quite like someone conflating completely different mathematical concepts! Linear algebra involves vector spaces, matrices, and transformations, while Sudoku is just a logic puzzle using numbers as placeholders. It's like telling an astronomer they must be great at astrology because both involve stars. The internal screaming is practically audible through that expression - every mathematician has made this exact face when someone thinks knowing calculus means you can calculate the tip faster.

The eternal struggle of every math student! Write a minus sign, and life goes on as normal. But accidentally write a plus sign? Congratulations, you've just entered the mathematical shadow realm where your entire calculation is doomed. That one tiny symbol transforms you from a colorful, optimistic problem-solver into a black-and-white nightmare of despair. The best part? You won't realize your mistake until you've spent 20 minutes wondering why the universe's fundamental laws suddenly stopped working. Nothing says "I've made a terrible mistake" quite like flipping your pencil over for the eraser, only to find it's been chewed down to a nub. Mathematical trauma in meme form!

The gender divide in time travel priorities is hilariously spot-on! While girls apparently use time machines for family reunions and ancestry verification, guys are busy correcting mathematical terminology with historical figures. That bottom panel shows peak nerd behavior - traveling through time just to suggest a nomenclature change to a mathematician! The fact that someone would use this incredible technology not to prevent disasters or witness historical events, but to debate mathematical semantics with Bernhard Riemann (or similar 19th century mathematician) is pure scientific pedantry at its finest. It's the ultimate "well, actually" moment spanning centuries!

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 eternal engineering student dilemma! When universities announced hybrid options post-pandemic, it created the ultimate Sophie's choice for engineering students: actual human interaction or the sweet, sweet freedom of using WolframAlpha during exams without suspicious proctors watching your every move. For those who spent four years calculating integrals by hand while WolframAlpha could do it in 0.3 seconds, this is the mathematical equivalent of "do I want friends or do I want an A+?" The pandemic taught us many things, but perhaps the most valuable lesson was that pants are optional and computational engines are forever.