Pure mathematics Memes

This is what happens when geometry majors finally snap! Topology—where mathematicians decided that counting holes in objects was a legitimate career path. In the regular world: "This is a coffee mug." In topology world: "Actually, this is a donut that hasn't accepted its true identity yet." Topologists spend decades creating elaborate theories just to prove that if you stretch, twist, and deform something without tearing it, it's still basically the same thing. Revolutionary stuff! Next they'll tell us water is wet. The bottom images perfectly capture what happens when you ask a topologist for directions to the grocery store. "Hello I would like" → *incomprehensible math equations* → "apples please"

The existential question of "y tho" perfectly encapsulates the reaction to someone spending 16 YEARS typing out numbers as words. Pure mathematicians are notorious for pursuing seemingly impractical problems with obsessive dedication. While applied math folks are building bridges and optimizing algorithms, pure math graduates are apparently documenting the linguistic representation of integers from 1 to 1,000,000. Just imagine typing "nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine" and then realizing you still have ONE more to go. The sheer pointlessness yet remarkable commitment is what makes this so brilliant. It's basically a PhD thesis nobody asked for!

The eternal dichotomy between application and theory! Engineers smugly smirk when their inventions go unused—"hahaha nobody applies your invention"—while mathematicians sob uncontrollably at the same fate. But flip the script with pure mathematicians, and you'll find they're playing 4D chess. One says "Nobody will apply your theorem ever" while the other responds "I hope so" with galaxy-brain energy. Pure mathematicians secretly want their work to remain theoretical forever—the moment someone finds a practical application, some government agency will classify it and they'll never see their beautiful equations again. Nothing ruins a mathematician's day like learning their abstract number theory just became the foundation of modern cryptography!