derivative
Explanation
This comic is about a calculus professor who cuts straight to the emotional core of differential calculus.
On the blackboard, a professor has written: "A = the number of symbols in a function. B = the number of symbols in that function's derivative. Homework: Find the function of finite length with the highest ratio of B to A."
The caption reads: "Rather than beating around the bush for a whole semester, Professor Jenkins forced us to prove that we hate differential calculus."
The joke hinges on a real mathematical frustration: for many functions, taking the derivative produces an expression that is far longer and more complicated than the original. For example, the derivative of a simple product or composition of functions can explode in length due to the chain rule, product rule, and quotient rule. Finding the function with the highest ratio of derivative length to original length is essentially asking students to find the most annoying possible calculus problem — one where a short, innocent-looking function produces a monstrously long derivative.
By framing the entire semester's worth of calculus as fundamentally an exercise in frustration, the comic captures the common student experience of differential calculus: the rules are straightforward, but applying them to real functions often produces unwieldy results that feel like punishment.