2014-02-16
Explanation
The Joke
Two children are having a typical schoolyard insult contest. One child escalates by saying "You stink times infinity!" The other child is stunned, realizing there might be nothing larger than infinity -- but then wonders, "Is there?" The caption reveals this was "A formative day for Georg Cantor."
The Humor
The comedy comes from reimagining the origin story of one of mathematics' most important breakthroughs. Georg Cantor was the mathematician who proved that there are, in fact, different sizes of infinity (for example, the set of real numbers is "larger" than the set of natural numbers, even though both are infinite). The comic humorously suggests that Cantor's groundbreaking work on transfinite numbers was motivated not by intellectual curiosity but by the childhood need to one-up a bully's insult. The idea that a profound mathematical discovery could stem from a petty playground argument is the core absurdity.
References
- Georg Cantor (1845-1918) was a German mathematician who created set theory and proved that infinite sets can have different cardinalities (sizes). His diagonal argument showed that the real numbers are uncountably infinite, while the natural numbers are countably infinite -- establishing that some infinities are indeed "larger" than others.