Mathematical-joke Memes

The eternal mathematical torture! Finding the smallest number in (0,1) is like trying to find the bottom step on an infinite staircase. You think 0.0001 is small? Nope, 0.00001 is smaller! How about 0.000000001? Still not the smallest! There's always a smaller positive number—just divide by 10 again! Poor Sisyphus got upgraded from pushing a boulder uphill to searching for the smallest positive real number. At least the boulder had an endpoint!

The perfect mathematical dad joke doesn't exi— Oh wait, here it is! This meme brilliantly plays on the fact that L'Hôpital's Rule (a calculus method for evaluating limits) wasn't actually discovered by Guillaume de l'Hôpital but by Johann Bernoulli. L'Hôpital essentially paid Bernoulli for his mathematical discoveries and published them under his own name. The gray character's initial smug "of course" followed by angry disappointment when corrected is peak mathematical justice. Historians of mathematics have been making this exact face since 1696.