simple
Explanation
This comic explores a real and fascinating pattern in mathematics: as you advance in mathematical sophistication, the textbooks paradoxically become simpler in appearance.
In the first panel, a professor explains that mathematics may seem intimidating because everything is reduced to symbols, but early math books are actually full of colors, large text, and friendly pictures. The student sees "It's an object of art!"
The middle section shows the progression: as you advance in your mathematical career, books become "simpler, shorter, and with fewer words and more symbols." The visual shows a graph going from thick, colorful children's math books through calculus and advanced mathematics, until at the frontier of mathematics, you reach papers that are tiny and dense.
The bottom panels deliver the punchline. This trajectory suggests that the very deepest math — the "theory of everything" — could be reduced to a single, infinitesimally small piece of paper with a single symbol on it. When asked what that symbol means, the answer is: "The universe is an exercise left to the reader."
This is a layered joke. First, it plays on the real observation that advanced math papers really do become terser and more symbol-heavy. Second, "exercise left to the reader" is an infamous phrase in math textbooks, used when authors skip over proofs they consider trivial (but students often find very difficult). Applying this phrase to the entirety of the universe is the ultimate academic cop-out — reducing all of existence to homework. It also pokes fun at the physicist's dream of a "theory of everything" by suggesting it might be trivially expressible but incomprehensibly deep.