riemann39s-quaternary-conjecture
Explanation
The Joke
A man is explaining what he calls "Riemann's Quaternary Conjecture" to a woman. He states that if you take a number that is equal to four and add it to itself enough times, the result is "e." He then hastily clarifies: "Not Euler's constant. Just the letter e." The entire "conjecture" is, of course, complete nonsense -- adding four to itself repeatedly just produces multiples of four (8, 12, 16...), and there is no mathematical reason the result would be the letter "e" or any other specific value.
The bottom caption reads: "Funtime Activity: Finding people with the last name Riemann and paying them to say stupid things." This reveals the premise behind the joke -- someone has found a person who happens to share the surname of the famous mathematician Bernhard Riemann and paid them to spout mathematical-sounding gibberish, lending it a false air of authority simply because of their name.
The Humor
The humor works on multiple levels. First, there is the absurdity of the fake conjecture itself, which strings together mathematical-sounding terms ("quaternary," "conjecture") into something utterly meaningless. The clarification that "e" is not Euler's constant but "just the letter e" makes the nonsense even funnier by preemptively addressing the one interpretation that might have made this sound vaguely mathematical, and replacing it with something even more incoherent. Second, the "Funtime Activity" caption satirizes how people tend to treat claims as more credible based on the speaker's name or credentials rather than the actual content of what is being said -- a comedic take on the appeal to authority fallacy.
References
The comic references Bernhard Riemann, the 19th-century German mathematician famous for the Riemann Hypothesis (one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics, concerning the distribution of prime numbers). It also alludes to Euler's number (e, approximately 2.71828), a fundamental mathematical constant named after Leonhard Euler. The word "quaternary" means "relating to four," which is used here as pseudo-mathematical jargon. The title parodies real mathematical conjectures like the Goldbach Conjecture or the Riemann Hypothesis itself.