How it Works
How it Works
[Cueball and a friend stand at a blackboard. The friend is writing, in standard mathematical notation, that the integral of x squared equals pi. No differential or bounds are given for the integral.] Cueball: Wow, you suck at math. [The same scene, except the writer is Megan.] Cueball: Wow, girls suck at math.

The comic reveals discriminative jargon against women when doing tasks such as mathematics. When a guy does something wrong, it's his own mistake. When a girl does something wrong, it is taken as a confirmation that girls are inferior.
The mathematics displayed is neither semantically nor syntactically correct. To begin with, there should (reasonably) be a dx after x 2 . Adding this, we have an indefinite integral on the left hand side.
The answer π is just nonsensical: What we want is a function whose derivative is x 2 . Now, x 3 /3 satisfies this condition. However, since adding a constant to a function does not change its derivative, the full answer is (any function of the form) x 3 /3 + C , where C is any fixed number. The "plus a constant" part is very easy to forget, and might even be omitted by a (sloppy) professional mathematician. So if someone really gave the answer π, "you forgot to add a constant" would be a pretty funny remark, because in one way it's true, but on the other hand it wouldn't quite be the main thing to worry about. (It is especially inane as π itself is a constant.)
It would also be possible to fix the equation by adding bounds of integration , so that π becomes the area below a section of the curve x 2 . That is called a definite integral, and there would be no "+ C". The bounds would have to be somewhat awkward though; if 0 was the lower bound, the cube root of 3π would have to be the upper.
[Cueball and a friend stand at a blackboard. The friend is writing, in standard mathematical notation, that the integral of x squared equals pi. No differential or bounds are given for the integral.] Cueball: Wow, you suck at math. [The same scene, except the writer is Megan.] Cueball: Wow, girls suck at math.
