Math Work
Math Work
[White Hat is watching Cueball from a couple of meters away. Cueball is contemplating the formulas and diagrams that fills the blackboard he stands in front of. Cueball holds a chalk in his hand. None of the content on the blackboard is readable, but there is a diagram in the shape of a circle and a another pie shaped diagram. Both are thinking with large thought bubbles above their heads, with small bubbles connecting them and the larger bubble.] White Hat (thinking): Amazing watching a physicist at work, exploring universes in a symphony of numbers. White Hat (thinking): If only I had studied math, I could appreciate the beauty on display here.
Cueball (thinking): Oh no. This has two unknowns. That's gonna be really hard. Cueball (thinking): Ughhhhhhh. Cueball (thinking): Think. There's gotta be a way to avoid doing all that work...

White Hat is observing a physicist , Cueball , who is staring at some equations and diagrams on a chalkboard (unreadable in the comic). White Hat is neither a physicist nor a mathematician , but he seems to glorify those professions. He wishes he understood the mathematics in Cueball's work and "the beauty on display here." People who profess a love for mathematics often cite the beauty they see in pure math, how things work out so perfectly, as the reason they love math.
The joke here is that Cueball as a physicist is doing something instead quite simple and relatable: Avoiding hard work. Solving many kinds of constraints for two unknowns isn't necessarily difficult, but can be depending on the details. Cueball clearly thinks a solution is possible but would rather find an easier route. The same could be said about the field of mathematics in general: A proof is beautiful to a mathematician when it provides aesthetic pleasure, usually associated with being easy to understand. A proof is elegant when it is both easy to understand and correct, and mathematical solutions are profound when useful.
The title text continues Cueball's thought process, with the possibility of using an automatic equation solver to find the unknowns. Equation solvers are not often considered beautiful ways to address purely mathematical problems, even if they are often the most efficient and in that sense elegant solutions to applied problems in engineering. Using a formal solver with symbolic, numeric, or both methods requires making sure that the constraints (e.g. equations) are entered correctly, with parentheses balanced in their correct locations for the solution to succeed. This might be a further joke about Cueball's laziness, suggesting that he doesn't even have the energy to check whether his parentheses are placed correctly. At the same time it might show how far away he is from finding the real solution: Any missing, misplaced or spurious parenthesis will most likely immediately invalidate the whole equation system.
[White Hat is watching Cueball from a couple of meters away. Cueball is contemplating the formulas and diagrams that fills the blackboard he stands in front of. Cueball holds a chalk in his hand. None of the content on the blackboard is readable, but there is a diagram in the shape of a circle and a another pie shaped diagram. Both are thinking with large thought bubbles above their heads, with small bubbles connecting them and the larger bubble.] White Hat (thinking): Amazing watching a physicist at work, exploring universes in a symphony of numbers. White Hat (thinking): If only I had studied math, I could appreciate the beauty on display here.
Cueball (thinking): Oh no. This has two unknowns. That's gonna be really hard. Cueball (thinking): Ughhhhhhh. Cueball (thinking): Think. There's gotta be a way to avoid doing all that work...
