Cursed-math Memes

So you're innocently learning about p-adic numbers (those weird alternate number systems mathematicians invented because regular numbers weren't confusing enough), and you decide to check what ...11111₁₃ equals in base 13. Seems harmless, right? Wrong. It equals -1/12. You know, that same cursed result that shows up when you naively sum all positive integers (1+2+3+4+...) using analytic continuation. The mathematical equivalent of finding the same Easter egg in two completely different video games. Your brain does the uncomfortable double-take because somehow, in the twisted logic of p-adics, an infinite string of ones doesn't blow up to infinity—it just casually sits there being negative and fractional. Mathematics really said "let's make infinity mean something completely different" and called it a day.

So you thought checking if TREE(n) is prime was bad? Welcome to the special circle of mathematical hell where someone decided to nest the fastest-growing function in mathematics inside a Mersenne prime formula. For context, TREE(3) is already so incomprehensibly large that it makes a googolplex look like pocket change—we're talking a number that dwarfs anything physically meaningful in the universe. Now imagine taking 2^TREE(p) - 1 and trying to verify if it's a Mersenne prime. Mersenne primes are already rare beasts (primes of the form 2^p - 1), and mathematicians have been hunting them with supercomputers for decades. But sure, let's just casually throw in a number so large that the universe would experience heat death before you could write it down, let alone test its primality. That cursed cat smile really captures the energy of someone who just proposed a conjecture that's technically well-defined but practically more useless than a chocolate teapot. "Easier than they seem" my foot—this is mathematical trolling at its finest.