2013-04-26
Explanation
This comic takes the common business slogan "The customer is always right" to its logical extreme. A mathematician sees a sign for "Porky's Diner" that reads "Where the customer is always right." He rushes inside and asks the employee, "Is that sign accurate?!" The employee confirms, "Yes sir!" The mathematician then declares, "The real part of any non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 1/2!" The final panel shows a newspaper headline: "Mathematician Proves Riemann Hypothesis."
The joke hinges on interpreting "the customer is always right" as a literal, absolute truth rather than as a customer service platitude. If the customer is truly always right about everything, then a mathematician can simply walk in, assert any unproven mathematical conjecture, and it becomes true by the restaurant's own policy. The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics (and one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize Problems), making it the perfect choice for the mathematician's exploit.
The votey panel extends the logical absurdity by asking: "If the customer is always right, does the universe end if he says 'I am wrong'?" This creates a liar's paradox -- if the customer says he is wrong, the policy says he must be right about being wrong, which means he is wrong, which means the policy fails.