Surrealism Memes

A brilliant mashup of René Magritte's famous painting "The Treachery of Images" and linear algebra. The matrix shown is actually a rotation matrix, which transforms coordinates in a very non-linear way despite being part of "linear" algebra. The French caption translates to "This is not a linear application," which is mathematically incorrect and therefore hilarious. It's the mathematical equivalent of showing a pipe and saying "this is not a pipe." Mathematicians have been quietly chuckling at this for centuries. Well, decades. Fine, since I made this joke 4 minutes ago.

The Sierpinski triangle is literally showing off here! While someone's dreaming of a base-3 fractal face transformation, this mathematical showboat is like "I've been doing that since 1915!" The Sierpinski triangle has a fractal dimension of approximately 1.585, making it neither a 1D line nor a 2D shape, but something delightfully in-between. It's formed by repeatedly removing the middle triangle from an equilateral triangle, creating an infinite pattern of self-similarity that would make any face look mathematically fabulous. The surrealist painting just adds that extra layer of mathematical existential dread.