Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic opens with the premise: "The more complicated the math, the dumber you sound explaining it." A person then attempts to explain Stokes' theorem in layman's terms: "Yeah, that's how if you draw a loop around something, you can tell how much swirly is in it."

The Humor

The humor comes from the painful accuracy of the observation. Stokes' theorem is a fundamental result in vector calculus that relates a surface integral of the curl of a vector field to a line integral around the boundary of that surface. It is an elegant and powerful mathematical statement. However, when forced to explain it in simple, non-technical language, even the most knowledgeable mathematician ends up sounding ridiculous -- reducing "curl of a vector field" to "how much swirly is in it." The comic captures the real frustration that experts in highly abstract fields face: the more sophisticated the concept, the more childish and vague any plain-English explanation inevitably sounds. The word "swirly" is particularly funny because it is technically not wrong -- curl does measure a kind of rotational tendency -- but it sounds absurd.

References

• Stokes' theorem is a statement in vector calculus that generalizes several theorems from multivariable calculus. In its classical form, it states that the integral of the curl of a vector field over a surface equals the line integral of the vector field around the boundary curve of that surface. It is one of the central results taught in vector calculus courses.