2014-01-02
Explanation
The Joke
A woman excitedly announces that she solved a variational problem that took 3 days and 40 pages of calculation. Another person points out she could have just used a computer algebra system (like Mathematica or similar software) to solve it. In the final panel, the woman is being arrested by police and defiantly yells "I regret nothing! NOTHING!" -- implying she attacked the person who suggested using a computer.
The Humor
The joke satirizes the pride mathematicians and physicists take in doing difficult calculations by hand, even when computational tools exist to do the work instantly. The woman has spent enormous effort solving a problem the hard way, and when someone suggests the trivially easy alternative, she becomes violent rather than accept that her labor was unnecessary. The humor lies in the extreme overreaction -- being arrested for assault -- which exaggerates the very real frustration people feel when they learn their painstaking manual work could have been automated. Her defiant "I regret nothing!" as she is hauled away in a devil costume suggests she would rather be a criminal than admit she wasted her time, capturing the irrational stubbornness of those who insist on doing things the hard way.