Maps Memes

Posts tagged with Maps

Why Would They Use More Than 4 Colors? 🤔
Math Science
1 month ago 4.8K views 0 shares
Why Would They Use More Than 4 Colors? 🤔
Mathematicians: "We've proven you only need 4 colors to create a map where no adjacent regions share the same color." Map makers: "Hold my rainbow." The Four Color Theorem is one of those elegant mathematical proofs that took 124 years to solve, only for cartographers to completely ignore it in favor of making maps look like a unicorn threw up on them. Sure, you could make do with just 4 colors, but where's the fun in mathematical efficiency when you can assault everyone's eyes with 17 shades of neon?

A Rare W For Differential Geometry
Math Earth-science Science
1 month ago 4.9K views 0 shares
A Rare W For Differential Geometry
This meme brilliantly showcases the mind-bending reality of geodesics on a curved surface! The straight-looking blue line between the USA and India isn't actually straight at all—it's a geodesic curve following the shortest path on our spherical Earth. Differential geometry FTW! While flat maps make it look like you'd sail through South America and Africa to get from the USA to India, the actual shortest path dips way south near Antarctica. It's the same reason airplane routes look weird on flat maps. Your brain wants a straight line, but Earth's curvature says "not today, navigator!" Mathematicians are sitting in the corner smugly nodding while everyone else questions their entire understanding of navigation.

Map Makers Everywhere Rejoice
Math
1 month ago 4.2K views 0 shares
Map Makers Everywhere Rejoice
The Four Color Theorem is that mathematical nightmare proving you only need four colors to make any map where no adjacent regions share colors. Meanwhile, UNO players are sweating bullets when two identical colors touch, forcing them to draw 25 cards as punishment. Cartographers spent 124 years proving this theorem (1852-1976), only for UNO to create more anxiety with a single card. Next time someone complains about their geography homework, remind them it could be worse—they could be playing UNO with a mathematician.

Alien Invasion For Dummies
Ufo Paranormal Conspiracy
1 month ago 7.0K views 0 shares
Alien Invasion For Dummies
Behold the extraterrestrial invasion strategy guide! While humans divide Earth into continents and countries with fancy colors, aliens have simplified their targeting system to just "America" and "who cares about the rest." Clearly they've been watching too many Hollywood movies where New York gets demolished first! Perhaps the aliens figured out that destroying the USA is the quickest way to eliminate 90% of superhero headquarters. Smart cosmic strategy or just lazy alien GPS? Either way, someone should tell them Australia exists too—those deadly spiders might be Earth's true final boss!

Mathematical Flex On Reddit
Math Science
1 month ago 5.2K views 0 shares
Mathematical Flex On Reddit
Mathematical flex level 100! The creator is brilliantly trolling Reddit by applying the famous Four Color Theorem—which states that any map can be colored using just four colors without adjacent regions sharing the same color. While everyone's busy posting random colorful US maps for whatever trending reason, this person decided to drop actual mathematical elegance into the feed. Notice how no bordering states share the same color? That's not an accident—it's pure mathematical genius disguised as a casual contribution. The perfect nerdy counter-strike to meaningless map trends!

The Great Cartography Debate
Earth-science Science Geology
4 months ago 7.5K views 0 shares
The Great Cartography Debate
The perfect illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect in cartography! That curved blue line represents the shortest path between two points on a globe (a geodesic), but mapping it onto a flat projection creates this apparent curve. The bell curve shows three perspectives: the confident-but-wrong crowd ("it's straight!"), the technically correct experts ("it's bent around Earth's curvature"), and my personal favorite—the person who just uses their eyeballs ("I can clearly see it's not straight"). What makes this extra hilarious is that the 20,000,000 km distance shown would actually be about 50 times Earth's circumference—so nobody's right! The ultimate cartographic mic drop for anyone who's ever argued about the "best" map projection.

New Chiral Compound Just Dropped
Chemistry Science
4 months ago 7.7K views 0 shares
New Chiral Compound Just Dropped
The map of Europe is upside down! This is a brilliant chemistry joke about chirality - molecules that are mirror images of each other but can't be superimposed. Just like your left and right hands, they're non-superimposable mirror images. In chemistry, we call these enantiomers, and they can have wildly different properties despite having identical chemical formulas. Flipping Europe upside down creates its "chiral partner" - a perfect visual pun on "new compound dropping" that would make any stereochemistry professor snort coffee through their nose. The real kicker? Many drugs only work in one chiral form while the mirror version is useless or even harmful. Nature has a strict preference, just like how this upside-down Europe feels deeply unsettling to our geography-trained brains!