Base systems Memes

What happens when mathematicians play Dungeons & Dragons? This alignment chart, but with number systems instead of personalities. Duodecimal (base-12) follows all the rules like a proper nerd. Hexadecimal (base-16) is just doing its computing job. Unary (base-1) is pure chaos—literally just ones all the way down. The chaotic evil "tree(3)" is basically mathematical nightmare fuel—a number so incomprehensibly large it makes Graham's number look like a rounding error. And that imaginary number "i" sitting there as neutral evil is perfect—it's literally the square root of negativity.

The equation "123 + 456 = 123456" is hilariously wrong in our decimal system, but it's actually correct if you're operating in base 1 (unary numeral system)! In base 1, numbers are represented by sequences of a single symbol - so "123" actually means "111" (or just 3 in decimal), and "456" means "111111" (or 6 in decimal). When you concatenate them, you get "111111111" (or 9 in decimal). It's like counting on your fingers but refusing to use more than one finger at a time. The bell curve shows the perfect distribution of people who get the joke - those who immediately reject it as wrong (left), those who understand the base 1 cleverness (right), and the blissfully confused majority in the middle who somehow think string concatenation is valid arithmetic. Mathematical humor at its nerdiest!