Two Scientists at a Board Working on an Eqation Funny

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EEqualsMCHammer

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E = MC Hammer

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"One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions—what are you going to land on? One-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics."

As You Know, some writers didn't exactly do well in math class. So, it seems that, with the passing of time, all their knowledge of math was condensed into a pile of information that they now paste on every chalkboard in school scenes or write in class notes, regardless of the knowledge necessary to understand those equations.

For example, a first-grade class will sometimes have lots of Gratuitous Greek such as "pi" (π) written on the board, which would probably only confuse the students who would only be learning arithmetic. Other popular examples are integrals, and their well-known "large S" ( ∫ ) symbol. Very often, however, there won't be any variable of integration. Elementary algebra will be represented as something like "x + y = z", which is entirely meaningless without a description of what the variables represent or how they relate to each other.

Then there's E=mc ² , the famous equation which has been degraded into nothing but a complex-looking decoration in everything from kids' cartoons to science shows. (E=mc ² is actually Albert Einstein's formula for mass-energy equivalence; far more people have heard of it than have any idea of what it actually means.) Especially comical if it's pronounced "eeyemseetwo" by people who don't realize the two represents an exponent.

Also related to relativity, ^note but this time general relativity instead of special relativity, the Einstein field equations (R_ab - (1/2)g_abR = (8πG/c ⁴ )T_ab) are rising in prominence as a decorative formula, as E=mc ² has started to become a cliché. Loosely, the terms of the left describe the curvature of space-time (which is perceived as gravity) whereas the terms on the right refer to the distribution of matter. ^note Solving these equations even for the simplest cases is far beyond almost anybody's abilities; solving them for our own spacetime has not yet been achieved in the entire century they've been known for, and isn't likely to happen any time soon. It requires graduate-level education in mathematics just to understand them; writing them out in any lower educational institution would be wholly pointless.

Then there's the big sigma (∑), the summation symbol. Nothing says smart like a big ol' sigma. There's also big pi (Π) notation (the symbol for a multiplicative version of the big sigma).

Trigonometric relations and the Pythagorean theorem are also popular, but don't ask to see words like "sine", "cosine", and "tangent".

If there's a shape diagram, it will usually be an Isosceles right triangle.

Furthermore, there're only two mathematical mistakes anyone ever makes, no matter how advanced their knowledge of the field; they either "misplaced the decimal point" or "forgot to carry the one". (Sign errors, which are more common, are conveniently absent.)

Math isn't the only subject that gets this treatment. Blackboards full of chemical formulae, sentence diagrams or plot/theme/character diagrams that stretch all over the whiteboard, or genealogies and timelines that look like a tangle of yarn are less common, but serve the same purpose.

This happens for three reasons: First, to ensure that there is some teaching going on, as the show itself thankfully never needs to show the actual classes. Second, to scare the young viewers into believing that they're going to see this stuff when they get older. Third, as a way of showing someone is really smart, often combining it with Room Full of Crazy.

Compare/contrast to Formula for the Unformulable, when characters try to calculate the incalculable and use visually similar equations. Compare Calculus Is Arcane Knowledge, for another trope regarding writers appearing intimidated by math.

See also Technobabble. If you were looking for the regular MC Hammer, go here.

Examples

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    Anime & Manga

• One scene in Neon Genesis Evangelion has some of this panned through before we see the characters in school. It makes an effort to show more than just disjointed numbers, but, as an AMV Hell segment showed, it got several equations horribly wrong.
• An episode of Air Gear shows the main character skating on a fence. The camera freezes when he jumps, and it overlays a Cartesian plane (height over time) with a parabola tracing his jump so far. y=x ² was written on the bottom. Never mind that the curve was concave down, so the formula should be negated. Never mind that he jumped from under the x-axis to cross the y-axis, which means he leapt from underground into negative time.
• In Ouran High School Host Club, a brief glimpse of Kyoya's homework shows real mathematical notation that actually makes some sense, but the context in which it is found is unlikely.
• In Is This a Zombie?, the protagonist makes the mistake of asking the resident "genius" to explain a math problem from the beginning. A few hours later: "...Spiral galaxies spin like this, kind of like a top. You need a string to spin it, and that's where string theory comes from. Oh, right. I want to touch on super string theory too..." Later on, after asking how soup could be used to destroy monsters (it makes sense in context), they are given a lengthy off-screen explanation concluding with "I can't answer any of your questions though. I don't understand the super string theory stuff either."
• Some of the math questions that appear on the board in Puella Magi Madoka Magica for an eighth grade math class are taken from, among other places, the entrance exam for Tokyo University. More information here.
  • Could be justified: the setting seems futuristic, and it's possible that, as technology becomes more advanced, our knowledge will as well.
• Used In-Universe in Yuyushiki. Ditzy Genius Yuzuko finds the Zeller's Congruence formula and understands what it does, but due to Rule of Funny, she can't figure out how to use it.
• Played with in a Sgt. Frog episode where the platoon disguise themselves as children at the Fuyuki siblings' school and Giroro is given a problem in the form of a chalkboard full of incomprehensible formulae. He stares at it all days and only hours after class had conclude does he notices a little "x 0" in the corner which apparently applied to everything, making the answer simply zero.
• Assassination Classroom surprisingly subverts this. Whenever the students have to fight a monster during their exams, they solve it in the correct way, including the language exams in Japanese and English. Considering that the exams get insanely difficult during the end, it almost borders on a Genius Bonus to even even know that all answers are correct.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, tends to appear around Bastion Misawa: first in his dorm room (and on his baseball bat), and later when he tries to work out how to defeat Jaden Yuki's deck. The presence of such scrawlings on a card also proves he is its owner when it's tossed into the ocean in a failed attempt to sabotage him.
• Doraemon: In "Experimental Dream Schemes", as Noby's Dreamplayer dream starts to malfunction, Princess Sue from his earlier sci-fi dream tells him to solve some math problems. The math problems written on the chalkboard are entirely nonsensical ones such as "monkey + dog - cat =", "ABC + DEFG =", and "sunflower x watermelon =".
• Invoked in the first episode of Futari wa Pretty Cure, when Nagisa is unable to solve a math problem, though it is implied that it is her worst subject, Honoka tells the teacher he wrote the equation wrong because it results in the answer being 0=-26,

    Comic Books

• In one Carl Barks comic book, the blackboard in a kindergarten classroom has a slightly illegible, possibly nonsensical mathematical expression written on it, including an integral sign (which, incidentally, does appear to have a variable of integration).
• An old Sidney Harris cartoon lampshades this one: two scientists are standing in front of a blackboard full of equations. In the middle of the board the chaos of integrals, summations, and other mathematical gobbledygook is interrupted by the statement "then a miracle occurs", and then the "equations" continue. The caption reads "I think you should be more explicit here in step two."
• Léonard le Génie does this often. Once he accidentally scribbled part of a long equation on the side of Raoul the cat.
• In one of the Buck Godot comic books, the classic erroneous proof that 2=1 (see "Real Life" section below) is used in a thought bubble to show Buck suddenly solving the case he has been working on throughout the comic.

    Comic Strips

• Parodied in a Calvin and Hobbes strip. Calvin nearly panics when asked to solve an arithmetic problem at the chalkboard. But then he calms down and deliberately stalls by doodling random symbols on the board until the bell rings.

    Fan Works

• One segment ^note It's at 43:28 in the AMV Hell 4 for AMV Hell focused on a slow crawl across a blackboard covered with math equations in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Halfway through the piece, we hear the Kevin Spacey in Superman Returns "WRONG!", and as the music is swapped out for King Missile's "Equivalencies", all the errors on the board are pointed out with red marker. Humorously, the segment also points out that although one solution does several things wrong, it ends up at the right answer anyway.
• In Alone, Together, after Kim gets stranded in an alternate universe inhabited only by herself and Shego, she tries to make sense of Drakken's notes and figure out a way to use his dimension-hopping invention to get home. At first, it all looks like gibberish to her (the description indicates that lots of sigmas and integral signs are involved). However, she does figure it out eventually, implying that it's all accurate science (or at least accurate Kim-Possible-universe mad science).

    Films — Live-Action

• In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Klaatu visits a leading scientist, but the man is not home. Klaatu makes an addition to a blackboard-covering equation, then leaves his contact information with the scientist's housekeeper. The addition to the equation was apparently intended to convince the scientist not to write off his unknown caller as a joke.
• In School of Rock, Jack Black's character writes E=mc ² on the board while pretending to teach the children something. Played with slightly in that he is totally clueless about teaching and this was presumably the only vaguely mathematical formula he could remember, and the school principal doesn't bat an eyelid when she walks into the room, even though the children are preteens.
  • When he's actually teaching the class the only subject he knows (rock, of course) he fills the board with a complicated diagram of rock bands.
• In the 2000 remake of Bedazzled, according to a blackboard in the background, a schoolteacher (Elizabeth Hurley) has assigned her students to prove Fermat's Last Theorem as homework. Of course, the schoolteacher was actually the devil and all of these scenes in-between wishes were of her intentionally screwing up the lives of other people.
• A minor example in Matilda, where the kindergarten students are learning the multiplication tables. Most kindergarten teachers are happy when their students can add one-digit numbers. This is possibly justified due to the Sadist Principal, Miss Trunchbull.
  • Could be justified by the fact that Miss Trunchbull is from England (which is where the original book takes place), and English schoolchildren start their formal education at an earlier age than American children do.
• In Good Will Hunting, the protagonist's brilliance is established when he solves in one day the problem of finding "all the homeomorphic irreducible trees of degree 10" which took a team of professors two years. This is a real math problem but while it sounds incredibly daunting its really the kind of thing any graduate student in mathematics should be able to solve in an afternoon.
• A Serious Man has a Dream Sequence featuring an implausibly large blackboard covered with enough of the stuff to fill a book.
  • Also, Arthur has a notebook he calls the Mentaculus that is full of equations and diagrams that apparently have something to do with probability.
• Pornographic films dealing with teacher/student relationships will often invoke this trope in the background in classroom settings.
  • Admittedly for college age (i.e. legal to have sex) students, E=mc ² is a reasonable equation for the coursework. Sometimes the person just gets lazy and simply writes "1+2=3" on the chalkboard which really gets your Fridge Logic going. Of course, you're not supposed to be paying attention to the chalkboard...
• E=mc ² abuse is played for laughs in Young Einstein, a fictional biography that is deliberately wrong in just about every way. Whenever a character reads it aloud, they pronounce it "emk".
  • In one scene, Albert walks in on a class in progress, where the teacher is writing "E=" and an insanely complex mess of scribbles covering the rest of the board. Albert helpfully wipes out a clean space and writes a big "mc ² ". He's physically thrown out of the room in response.
• In Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy, Dr. Cooper is first seen inventing the anti-depression drug by finishing a gigantic equation on the chalkboard with "=HAPPY".
• Subverted in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. While Moriarty's chalkboard was covered with mathematical symbols and formulae, the writers consulted with actual mathematicians in order to make sure they were scientifically accurate for the time period. According to one of the scholars involved, the original design for the chalkboard would have invoked this trope as explained here.
  • There's also a nod to the Holmes canon - Moriarty is said to be known for his work on the binomial theorem, and the blackboard includes Pascal's triangle, which is one way of finding binomial coefficients.
• In The Absent-Minded Professor (the original), the eponymous professor has a giant equation on the blackboard behind him. This example also contains a rare sign error: he realizes one of his minuses should be a plus. This eventually leads him to the discovery of flubber.
• In Pacific Rim, the German scientist Gottlieb is shown writing tough formulas on a huge blackboard.

    Literature

• In the Sword Of The Galaxy book series, a simple algebraic expression can be used by the Trakkorians to enter hyperspace. When the author received complaints about this piece of Fridge Logic, he recited the MST3K Mantra.
• In Mr. Men Annual No. 3, a worm in Cleverland has E=mc ² in the corner of a book (the rest of the text being shown as wiggly lines).
• In Men at Arms, Sergeant Detritus gets Locked in a Freezer and his intelligence is boosted to the limit by being frozen nearly to death. His rescuers discover that he has written in the frost an enormous, complicated formula ending in an ominous equal sign, and nothing on the other side.
  • His eyes were flashing on and off when they pulled him out, so presumably the cold overcame him just before he could write the answer.
• The Maelstrom by Roger E. Moore (Cloakmaster Cycle) has a good parody of the "E=mc ² says it all" version.

    Live-Action TV

• A sketch in series 1 episode 3 of A Bit of Fry and Laurie involves a "hilarious blooper" from a 1970s Open University programme, in which Hugh Laurie's presenter talks us through a blackboard full of nonsensical integral-like equations. What's more, the flub involves the equation giving a "resultant modular quantity" of 0.567395, rather than 0.567359 as Laurie's character states, when the integral in question has no limits and wouldn't have a numerical solution, not to mention that the programme appears to be a physics lecture about wave theory, which wouldn't involve numbers that precise as solutions anyway... Hmm, come to think of it, that's a hilarious blooper in itself! I don't believe it! Ha ha ha ha!
• In The Big Bang Theory Penny rattles of the meanings of all the terms in 'E=mc ² '; when her friends express astonishment at her actually knowing that, she explains that it's something Leonard repeats when he's trying to last longer in bed.
• In the Covert Affairs episode "Walter's Walk", Auggie refers to a sequence of numbers as being a "complex cyclic permutation". But a permutation is a rearrangement of things, not a sequence. Moreover cyclic permutations are the simplest of all permutations, and talking about them being complex makes no sense. Everyone also mixes up complicated and complex. Complex means having multiple parts, complicated means puzzling.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Three Doctors": After coming through the black hole, the physicist Dr. Tyler writes the famous equation in the sand. Justified, too — he's trying to come to grips with the fact that he's just traveled at the speed of light.
  • One of the forms of written Gallifreyan (the Time Lords' language) appears to be this, specifically Old High Gallifreyan.
  • "The Impossible Planet" has Maxwell's equations of electric and magnetic fields as graffiti on a table in the cafeteria.
  • In Series 8 of the new series in particular, the Twelfth Doctor shows an affinity for writing equations and diagrams (among other things) on chalkboards.
    • His first episode ("Deep Breath") takes this Up to Eleven. While suffering from a severe bout of amnesia and delirium, he gets a hold of a piece of chalk and covers his entire bedroom in mathematical equations.
• In an Imagine Spot, Everybody Hates Chris has a Sadist Teacher demand to know, giving no context whatsoever, "What is a ² plus b ² ?!?". The correct answer is apparently "c ² ". In other words, the protagonist has internalized the most common expression of the Pythagorean theorem, but with no clue of what it actually means.
• The Trope Namer is a pastiche of E=mc ² that appeared in a scene of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars where Harvey (who was named after the Not-So-Imaginary Friend of the movie Harvey) writes "E = MC Hammer" on a blackboard of other nonsense. Especially funny in that Crichton, as a physicist and an astronaut, would know exactly what E=mc ² actually means, and Harvey is likely just dicking around.
• In Lost Seasons 4 & 5 you get both Daniel Faraday (4) & his mother (5) just constantly writing gibberish on the chalkboard while conducting experiments.
  • Terrifyingly, the DVD shows that a real professor of physics wrote that gibberish up for them.
• Spoofed in an episode of Mythbusters. Grant sketched out a complex but valid mathematical formula on the side of a test vehicle. After Grant finished the calculations and announced the result, this exchange occurred:
• In the NCIS episode "Red Cell", Abby and McGee get into an argument about whether or not a set of equations is homology or cohomology. But the operator symbols are different in these two concepts, and what are subscripts in homology are superscripts in cohomology. No one with sufficient education (as Abby and McGee have) can mistake one for the other.
• NUMB3RS gets a lot of credit for having both correct (syntactically) and relevant (in the context of the episode) math equations. Generally, it does — when the equations are displayed in the foreground. Whenever we see one of the fancy animations while Charlie explains something, though, expect at least half of the math in the background to be random and irrelevant. It gets to the point where even people who know nothing about math should be able to figure out that the equations are meaningless, because they appear even when the explanation Charlie is giving is not mathematical in nature (like the infamous IRC explanation, which doubles as being wholly inaccurate itself).
• Rimmer does this to himself in Red Dwarf when he covers his arms and legs in astrophysics equations that are beyond his capacity to understand to cheat on a test he is clearly not qualified to pass.

  Rimmer: Right, they're bound to ask the right thigh, which is 10 per cent. They must ask the left thigh, which is 20 per cent. They've got to ask one of the forearms. Which means I've passed already; anything on the left shin's a bonus! Right. *Looks at one arm* `CUTIE'. Current under tension is... what's this? Current under tension is equal? Current under tension is expendable? Current under tension is expensive? What does this mean? *Begins to panic* What does any of it mean? I've covered my body in complete and utter and total absolute nonsense gibberish!

• In the pilot episode of Sliders, the main character leaves his blackboard covered in equations, not knowing what to write after the equals sign. When he comes back, his double has solved it, and the expression he has written has an infinity symbol on the denominator. That's right. He just needed to divide by infinity.
• One of the clips in the Star Trek: Enterprise opener shows a black and white image of a scientist writing complex equations across a blackboard. It looks very fancy until the glaring mathematical error.
  • In his original pitch for Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry wanted to use the Drake equation to demonstrate how likely it was we'd encounter aliens. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember the Drake equation, so he just made something up (including two variables being raised to the first power). In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Future's End" Rain Robinson's work station has both equations on the wall.
  • The original series episode "Court-Martial" refers to amplifying the sound of a heartbeat by a factor of "one to the fourth power"... which is one, meaning no amplification (or attenuation) at all.
• In Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills episode "The Spy", Black and Nerdy Swinton ends a joke with a E = MC Hammer.
• In That '70s Show, Eric's parents see fit to check that he's not neglecting school, so Red asks him sternly, "What is X?". Eric just stares at him, then very politely explains that it's a variable that can represent a given number. The parents think it sounds right, but neither of them actually know what answer they were expecting.
• In an episode of Torchwood, a integral equation was used to open the rift that led Jack and Tosh into the past. It didn't seem very realistic, though at least it had integration variables.

    Music

• Mariah Carey went so far as to name her most recent album E=MC ² . She claims it stands for "(E) Emancipation (=) equals (MC) Mariah Carey to the second power." Yeah right.
  • See the Quantum Mariah Carey Problem for further discussion.
• Subverted and literal: Doctor Steel raps about the Fibonacci Sequence.
• Big Audio Dynamite included a song called E=MC ² on their first album. ^note It's a Non-Appearing Title and a Genius Bonus. The song is about the films of Nicolas Roeg and the title references the appearance of Einstein as a character in Insignificance
• E=MC ² appears on the Schoolmaster's blackboard in the gatefold art of Pink Floyd's The Wall.
• British rock band Pulled Apart By Horses actually have a song called E=MC Hammer. It's bloody good.
• MC Hawking, the little-known gangsta-rap career of the famous physicist.
• The title of P.D.Q. Bach's opera Einstein on the Fritz (whose surviving prelude is indexed as S. e=mt ² ), according to the liner notes to 1712 Overture & Other Musical Assaults, refers to one 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Alphonse Einstein, whose best-remembered equation symbolizes the proposition that energy equals matzoh balls in chicken soup. Originally this equation was written e=mbcs, but Einstein later decided to omit the bs and add a superscripted numeral 2 to signify that this was a square meal.

    Music Videos

• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • The video "White and Nerdy". Just to show how smart Alfred is. Ironically, it contains an error.
  • Alas, in the song "Pancreas" he gets Newton's equation for the gravitational force between two masses wrong.
• The "E=MC Hammer" example was also used in the video to the Texas song "Sleep", appearing on a chalkboard during a scene where Texas frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri and Peter Kay parody the video to Lionel Richie's "Hello."
• On the DVD version of the Pink Floyd Pulse live video, at the beginning of "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)," a student writes E=mc ² on his test and then furiously scribbles over it. Mentioned here because it's a CGI alteration—the student originally wrote the word "ENIGMA."

    Pinballs

• To track what ingredients are needed in the Gilligan's Island pinball to make Volcano Seltzer, the Professor's formula is shown iconically on the playfield, with nonsense like "...[seashell] +/- (mix well and add) [rope] - ( [shrunken head] < [turtle eggs] ) / [banana]..."

    Radio

• Lo Zoo Di 105: An Unreal Radio sketch (aired on March the 21st, 2011) had "Professor Incredible Hulk Batman Einstein Bruce Banner Jr." ^note (no, really - that Overly Long Name being spelled exactly like that is a Running Gag/Overly Long Gag in said sketch) trying to solve the "Jordan-Chiambretti theorem", which "explains why there are so little short basketball players."

  Professor Incredible Hulk Batman Einstein Bruce Banner Junior: "So, the basket is three meters above the ground... [three meters] minus Brunetta ^note (former minister Renato Brunetta, known for his less-than-average heigth)... equals two..."

    Video Games

• The first few levels of Super Paper Mario decorate the background with "joke" equations, made up of random numbers and mathematical symbols combined with famous Mario icons such as the Fire Flower and mushrooms.
• In EarthBound (1994), Doctor Andonuts has a big chalkboard in his lab with nothing written on it but a big "E=mc ² ".
• Half-Life has a number of blackboards adorned with Newton's equation for gravity. In Black Mesa, a top secret military research facility. That's like Ernest Hemingway trying to come to grips with "Hop on Pop".
  • This is lampshaded and blasted to bits in Freeman's Mind.
• In Portal 2, there are posters around that list paradoxes in the event of a rogue AI. One of the listed paradoxes is "Does a set of all sets contain itself?" ^note This is clearly based on Russell's Paradox: "Does a set of all sets that do not contain themselves contain itself?" The way it's written, though, it's a nonstarter. The "set" of Russell's Paradox is a subset of this "set", and thus, the "set" described isn't a set. ^note Although it does actually function as a version of the Liar Paradox. The Obvious Rule Patch for Russell's Paradox is that a set cannot contain itself. Thus the set of all sets does not contain itself, and is not the set of all sets.
  • Knowing the dev team's sense of humor, it might be deliberate.
• While chalkboards in Team Fortress 2 do sport real equations (including the ridiculously complicated equation they use for rendering rim lights), it also boasts "equations" like "FIRE = QQ".
• The World Ends with You's Mad Mathematician Sho Minamimoto not only SPEAKS in Math, he uses it as his Formulaic Magic and the incantation of a Level i Flare.
• Played for laughs in the Alcatraz Elementary level of Nightmare Ned, where one segment involves Ned navigating a giant chalkboard littered with nonsensical equations and diagrams, some of which come to life, and set entirely to a math teacher singing a musical number in the background.
• Parodied in Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, in which a chalkboard at the Kong Kollege reads "9÷3=6", "8×1=9", and "4+2=5" under the title "Exam". The joke, of course, is that the Kremlings that attend the school are dumb.

    Web Comics

• This xkcd strip includes an integral without a variable of integration, as part of a clearly erroneous equation — but in this case the error is integral to the punchline.
  • The variable of integration is obvious, since there's only one variable; the bigger issue is somehow getting a constant out of an indefinite integral (this would only happen if you nonsensically integrated zero, and even then you wouldn't get a specific constant because the derivative of any constant is zero). But this is also part of the joke, and the Alt Text takes it further: "It's pi plus C, of course."
• A more elaborate variant appears in this cartoon by Tom Tomorrow. Instead of meaningless numerical symbols, it's an invalid proof that involves dividing by zero, perhaps to complement the scientist's fallacious reasoning.
  • The invalidity of the proof is probably intentional, but it still appears to be copied from an online source by someone who doesn't understand mathematical notation. It writes "a^2" instead of "a ² " (the former notation is a substitute that is only ever used when technical constrains make it impossible to write the latter, which is not the case for blackboards).
• In Two Lumps, Eben is occasionally shown contemplating equations right before Snooch interrupts with his latest insanity. In at least one instance readers have submitted corrections for the math displayed.
• Although Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is usually quite good about this sort of thing, this strip features a justified example - the designers are snowing their audience.
• In Lovecraft Is Missing, the characters fill in blackboards translating to mathematical concepts both music composition and the works of H. P. Lovecraft - apparently old Howard hid some spells in tales. While translating, there's something of an example of something that could be Misplaced a Decimal Point or Carry the One: "Aw, now that don't make no kinda sense... Wait a minute. Yes it does. I was flat out wrong. I thought I made a misake when I hadn't."
• One of the trolls of Homestuck infamy takes his stubborn insistence on magic not being real and how everything can be explained by "science", to the point that it's hard to tell what he even means by "science" anymore, eventually becomes a science-powered wizard of hope and light, gets into a magical duel with his science wand, and as his opponent battles with magical lights flying by in the background, his end of the duel has little "E=MC2"s in a similar role. (It's worth noting that the author, Andrew Hussie, actually does have an extensive knowledge of real-world physics and he uses it in his stories when he feels like it. If Eridan is a straw man for anything, it's not the use of the scientific method or anything.)
• In Everyday Heroes, when discussing the value of Summer and Carrie working for Ben Sharpley, the chalkboard is covered with economics-related acronyms and equations.
• In El Goonish Shive, Diane reveals that her father is Raven, after which others in the group share other information related to him, Immortals and his mother Pandora, like the fact that he fought a bad guy. Ashley, the newest member of the main cast, who has not met Raven yet or knows anything about him, assembles all these separate details into a hilarious mental image of a raven-themed superhero and then goes on in a Sherlock-style mental math sequence that features multiple hilariously unrelated math equations, including the additional amount of pizza you get from ordering a 14 inch instead of 12 inch pizza and the Konami Code. Her tentative conclusion after all that is simply that Diane's father, Raven, is the son of an Immortal known as Pandora - which is correct, but not that hard to figure out.

    Web Original

• Annoying Orange: In "Easy as Pi", Professor Pi gets sliced throughout the episode, and after a while, he spits out stuff like this due to the removal of his brain.

  Professor Pi: And the number on the bottom of the fraction is called the "denuptiderp". Now if we add 5 plus 7 bananas we get the color purple.

• The title card for The Angry Video Game Nerd video Chronologically Confused features the Nerd in front of a board filled with nonsensical equations and formulae, including at points a Triforce and a drawing of Mario.
• E equals MC Hawking.
• This FailBlog entry tries to show Einstein's equation but, well, fails.
• Fan Art for the Whateley Universe: Hot Scientist Bugs, who is a genius deviser with a fascination with egg shapes: here.
• Episode 1 of Echo Chamber has Tom and Dana (and possibly Zack) trying to figure out how to "show a Show Within a Show" and covering an entire blackboard with ideas, including nonsensical chemical and mathematical formulae that have little to do with...anything they are trying to discuss.
• The blog Blackboards in Porn is devoted to pointing out examples of this trope in pornography.
• In A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever, a parody of Oscar Bait movies, Inspirationally Disadvantaged Guy's whiteboard is filled with mathematical scribblings, and an English Lit variant appears on the blackboard in Latin-American Teenager's classroom.
• Manatee Girl: The Movie has "science" on the board behind Hunky Marine Biologist Boyfriend. The "science" in question involves a picture of a crudely drawn fish being added to numbers and EC equals MC squared randomly on the side.
• The flash animation music video of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Everything You Know Is Wrong" includes a slew of mathematical formulas that start off correct and grow wackier until

  2 + 2 = Butt

• "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 2 - TIME" contains, among other things on a blackboard, 卐 = MC² and π = 19.6(y).

    Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: The chalkboard in the classroom usually has an equation for the fiction "Fritz Shoenig Theory," which consists of a summation formula and algebraic forms that would be unlikely to be recognized in a 5th grade classroom.
• Spongebob Squarepants usually has Sandy show SpongeBob some equations. One instance of this has Sandy showing SpongeBob an equation that is a bizarre hybrid of a function and an infinite limit.
• Spiderman The Animated Series The formula for the Super Soldier serum is shown as a math formula rather than a chemical one.
• The Fairly OddParents has done this as well. Sometimes justified, since the teacher that appears most often believes that math means nothing in a universe where fairies exist.

  Mr. Crocker: A fairy could make two plus two equal... FIIIIISH!

• In Tom and Jerry episode "Guided Mouse-ille" the final act involves Tom making a homemade explosive with equations that end up in "KABOOM!". After Jerry drops his own bomb into the concoction, it explodes and somehow throw the two into the Stone Age.
• Abused by Dexter's Laboratory.
• Professor Utonium's lab in The Powerpuff Girls. And Pokey Oaks Kindergarten. In one episode, Ms. Keane starts out with "1 + 1 = 2", then proceeds to give a theoretical description of time travel.
• Fillmore! has an episode set around a maths test. When the teacher gives her class an assignment, it reads: 2+x=5, x-y= 16, -2x-y=-14, 2x+4y=12, -2x+ 5y=5. She asks them to solve both x and y, and tells them to spend the rest of the lesson doing so. This amount of time would make sense, as it's actually impossible—the value of x and y changes in those equations from one example to the next. And what is worse, the moral of the story is that "the value of x remains constant". Arghh!
• The intro to Pinky and the Brain has a scene where Brain is writing his "theory of everything" on a chalkboard, which is basically a bunch of pseudo-mathematical mumbo-jumbo, including "THX=1138". Spoofed in another episode which has Brain reveal that his latest plan to take over the world was hinged on an equation he had just uncovered. Pinky askes him if it is something complicated like E=mc ² , and Brain replies that it is in fact even simpler, just E.
• Monkey Dust has a chalkboard full of geometry in a class teaching cottaging! (For non-UK readers, that's anonymous gay sex in public bathrooms). True to the title of this trope, the board also contains "run=dmc".
• The Simpsons:
  • When Homer has a bright idea, the camera would occasionally do a close-up of his head, revealing two chimpanzees in graduation gowns and mortarboards writing E=mc ² on a chalkboard. Otherwise, the chimps would be grooming each other and eating the lice.
  • Parodied when Homer is an inventor. During a montage, he's shown writing equations on a blackboard. After he's done, the camera moves to shot of the house—where there's a massive explosion. Cut back to Homer: who examines his equation and crosses out the offending section, a drawing of a stick of dynamite, which he then replaces with something else. This results in another, bigger explosion.
  • And subverted in another episode: Homer puts on some Nerd Glasses he finds in the power plant's toilets and immediately recites what he seems to think is the Pythagorean Theorem (he's actually quoting The Wizard of Oz movie):

    Homer: The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side!
    Co-worker in a stall: That's a right triangle, y'idiot!
    Homer: D'oh!

  • Variation, in the episode in which the Simpsons discover the third dimension, "P=NP" can be read in the 3d-CGI world.
  • Also parodied in "Moneybart":

    Nelson: Lisa's a genius! She can do the kind of math that has letters! Watch: what does X equal, Lisa?
    Lisa: Well, that depends...
    Nelson: She could do it yesterday, I swear!

• The board in Arthur's class would often be filled with formulas like the Pythagorean theorem or simple derivatives, even though the characters are respectively three and six years too young for them. Apparently, this is part of Mr. Ratburn's Sadist Teacher reputation.
• In Rocko's Modern Life in an episode where Rocko keeps being late for work. While he gets berated for it by his boss, there's a flipchart in the background that contains, amongst other things, a clipart of a clock followed by a plus-minus sign and a square root containing "MC" and a clipart of a hammer.
• In Code Lyoko, the same board (y=ax+b) is used for every science course. Including one about parthenogenesis.
• In Robot Chicken, they parody this trope in a sketch. Where two scientists are laughing their heads off to a bizarre problem on the board, only for one of them to stop, erase a symbol, add another, and then both burst out laughing again.
• One episode of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh centered on Gopher's "equation for the ultimate tunnel." How and why the layout for a tunnel took the form of a chalkboard full of mathematical-looking scrawlings was never explained.
• Happens in You're In Love, Charlie Brown where Charlie Brown, when called to solve a relatively simple math problem, ends up filling half the chalkboard with nonsensical geometry formulas, wanting to impress the Little Red-Headed Girl. When the teacher asks him what the hell he's doing, snapping him out of his trance, he sheepishly admits he has no idea.
• Kaeloo: For explaining just about anything, the characters will pull out a board full of complex mathematical equations... even if whatever they're saying has nothing to do with math.
• The Warner Bros. cartoon "Sport Chumpions" uses an animated diagram to analyze a play in football that was just executed. It starts simple enough, but as the explanation goes on it becomes high-pitched and frantic with the diagram an unintelligible mess and the breathless narrator capping it with "And there you are."
• Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century does this on a graph of outer space as he tells eager young space cadet Porky Pig how to reach Planet X. The graph is an incoherent mess yet Dodgers explains this as if he knows what he's talking about.
• Ready Jet Go!: In "Jet's First Halloween", Sean's "can't fail scientific method formula" to get candy in the least amount of time goes "T = H + C^2" or in Layman's Terms, houses + great costumes = lots of candy.

    Real Life

Exceptions

    General

• Clausius-Clapeyron and the derivation via the Maxwell relations is extremely common, usually as Mad Science. It's easy to copy verbatim, and looks scary because it's an important equation in Thermodynamics and requires high level chemistry, physics, and mathematics to understand.

    Anime & Manga

• The opening credits of The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya feature a number of diagrams and equations, including the obligatory E=mc ² , the Drake Equation and Shannon's source entropy formula, appropriately enough (as well as plenty most people have never heard of). In "Snow Mountain Syndrome" of the later novels, though, solving an instance of Euler's planar graph formula becomes a matter of great importance, so this is to be expected. That and the guy that writes the Light Novel likes math.
• In a chapter of Pluto by Naoki Urasawa, we see Atom to write on a wall a huge quantity of equations. While they are probably correct (the notation is correct, for instance and any single expression makes sense), it is not probable that they are "the formula of the anti-proton bomb": some are mathematical definitions, or Fourier tranforms, other appears to be basic equations of quantum physics, but surely not a project of bomb.
• Subverted in a Moment of Awesome in Tobaku Datenroku Zero. Near the end of a psychotic quiz game in which a super-sharp pendulum is lowered when the answer is wrong, Ukai Zero is answering a trivia question about the period of a pendulum. He's shown to be under pressure, thinking up a bunch of random equations which have nothing to do with the relevant speeds of rotation. And he gets the question wrong. However, it turns out that all those equations were him using the measurements of his body parts to ascertain that, with his next incorrect answer, the anchor would crash into the block his head was resting on, effectively winning the game. The MC was not happy.
• Not actually an equation, but the blackboard in computer science class in Serial Experiments Lain shows an entirely plausible and workable (partial) code for a Conway's Game of Life implementation. It's a bit too straightforward and not very efficient, but it is a teaching example. What's interesting here is that the code is written in Common Lisp — a somewhat obscure programming language, but one with a long history of an intellectual superiority. Which is entirely in tune with the show's Viewers Are Geniuses approach.

    Comic Books

• FoxTrot:
  • One strip has Insufferable Genius Jason Fox, a ten-year-old, solving a simple division problem on his class chalkboard. In the process, he also rewrites the equation in about a dozen different ways, many of which would require knowledge of trigonometry or calculus to understand. Given that the cartoonist Bill Amend majored in physics in college, all of them are correct.
  • Another strip has Jason serving as Paige's math tutor and the latter asking him what is the cosine of 60 degrees. Jason then starts rattling off a really long sum and only stops when Paige reminds him she's not paying him by the hour. Said sum is the actual Taylor series expansion of the cosine, meaning of course he could continue going forever. The answer she was looking for is 0.5.
  • Another strip has Jason presenting Paige with an alphanumeric cipher with a twist: the key is comprised of 26 math problems, one for each letter of the alphabet. One of the clues involves integral calculus (but of course it's for Q, which doesn't get used much). The answer is "PAIGE FOX IS BAD AT MATH".
  • And another strip shows Jason doing a problem in class where he has to calculate the area of a farm enclosed by a fence of some length and width. Naturally, he draws out a coordinate plane for the farm and does an integration to find the area under the curve. That's definitely the method you all would choose, right?
  • Then there's the strip showing Peter holding several sheets of paper covered in equations, and a diagram of a catapult. The purpose? Allow Jason and Marcus to fly into Paige's room with squirt guns.

  Peter: From such smarts, such stupidity.

    Films — Live-Action

• A very common mockery thrown at the movie A Beautiful Mind is that in promo posters for the movie, Russell Crowe as John Nash is sitting making a thinking face behind a glass wall covered in equations. Right on his forehead is the statement "0 < pi < 1". Geeks had a lot of fun mocking the apparent total lack of understanding of math in Hollywood and coming up for ways this statement might be justified (often speculating on the shape of Russell Crowe's penis). In reality, there was a perfectly good explanation, in fact: The math consultant for the movie had been asked to help prepare the shoot for this poster by covering the glass wall with impressive-looking equations, and for "authenticity's" sake had done so using real equations from the real John Nash's papers. John Nash was a game theorist, and he had written a paper involving an imaginary game with 24 players. Since there are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, he playfully decided to name the imaginary players after Greek letters. The "0 < pi < 1" statement comes from a portion of the paper describing an imaginary situation involving placement of turn order within the game. Notice that Nash was specifically doing this in order to undermine mathematicians insistence on using symbols to mean just one thing.

    Literature

• Robert A. Heinlein was meticulous about everything he ever wrote about. While much of his work has been victim to Science Marches On, he would often spend whole chapters explaining why something does or doesn't work in his future technologies. One of his most mindboggling and in depth explanations (for a layman) was the short story —And He Built a Crooked House—, where he actively explains how to create a tesseract house in four dimensions. He mentions in his non-fiction writing that when he was doing his earliest juvenile novels - mostly wham-bang space opera involving teenage boys fighting Nazis on the Moon and such - he and his wife Virginia still made complete orbital calculations for the spacecraft, working longhand on rolls of butcher's paper. He did make some errors in the end: In Starman Jones, he mentions that one planet had a moon, thereby making it possible to measure the planet's mass. He forgot that the spacecraft itself would serve (as the equivalent of the moon) to measure the mass. Furthermore, measuring the mass of any planet would be an essential part of traveling through the star system.

    Live-Action TV

• Considering that the show NUMB3RS has, well, numbers as its unique gimmick, it would be pretty insulting if this were the case. They keep a mathematician on staff who writes all of the equations seen.
• For the physics class scenes in 3rd Rock from the Sun, much of Dick's dialogue was written by Elegant Universe author Dr. Brian Greene.
• An episode of Stargate SG-1 had Major Carter guest-lecturing Air Force cadets on a multiple-universe theory, in front of the "chalk board full of formulae" version of this trope. According to the episode's commentary, the mathematics on the board were real. Carter made an original mistake as well — she accidentally inverted one of the ratios. A cadet actually walks up and stares at the board before pointing out the mistake, only to be chastised by the professor for correcting a scholar. Carter then re-examines the problem and also sees the mistake, noting that it completely changes the problem. She is then very interested in the cadet for being smart enough to spot it.
• University of Oklahoma chemistry professor Donna Nelson serves as the science consultant for Breaking Bad, so the chemistry Walter teaches his high school class is accurate. They intentionally change some of the steps for making methamphetamine so that viewers don't learn how to make meth from the show, and change the color of the meth in order to make it more visually interesting.

    Video Games

• The Half-Life fan remake Black Mesa includes numerous formulae on the whiteboards of the labs in the opening segments, this time of the sort that physicists studying exotic materials might actually be using.
• In Final Fantasy VII, as part of the Overly Long Fighting Animation for Sephiroth's Signature Move, Supernova, complex mathematical formulas quickly flash across the screen. These are actual calculations used in astrophysics — albeit with some mistakes, but the intent to get it right is clearly there — and though most of that animation has been truncated in Sephiroth's subsequent appearances in Dissidia Final Fantasy and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the formulas are an iconic part of the move's look that always remain.

  Φ = WU_γ+RU_ρ+SU_γU_ρ
  W = -SU_γΦ ^note The sun and planet's potential attractive forces. A mistake is that the γ are supposed to be λ.
  AU = (GMek^-2)^{1/3 note} The Earth's potential attractive forces.
  n = πr^{2 note} The area of a circle. This is a mistake in that it assumes the asteroid he's summoning is on a two-dimensional plane; it should be n = 4πr², the area of a sphere.

• Portal 2:
  • In the cooperative mode, some whiteboards have Fourier transforms written on them. This would be quite useful for a lab that screws with physics as much as Aperture does.
  • Early in the single-player game, a wall in one of Ratman's Rooms Full of Crazy shows a cat jumping (or perhaps tunneling? {probably tunneling in a reference to the phenomenon of quantum tunneling}) out of a box, along with various Quantum Physics equations, a reference to the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment that was played with in the tie-in Lab Rat comic.
• One splash screen in the "bodychecking hoverboarders" game Pararena has the quite relevant "F = ma" hidden upside-down in the corner.

    Web Comics

• Also, for the most part, any xkcd strip will be extremely accurate.
• Schlock Mercenary, being hard sci-fi, routinely dissects and discusses the sorts of physics involved in space travel. The writer encourages readers to check his work, and occasionally posts problems for the readers to solve themselves, such as the space elevator between Earth and the Moon.

    Web Original

• The title sequences for Game Theory features a simple physics equation describing Mario's jump and a moving Koopa shell.

    Web Video

• Epic Rap Battles of History: The calculation Isaac Newton posits to Bill Nye at the end of one of his verses is "The integral sec y dy from 0 to 1/6 of pi is log to base e of the square-root of 3 times the 64th power of WHAT?!. It's a real equation Newton developed, though obviously without the smug "WHAT?!" at the end, and Tyson's answer of 'i' (as in the imaginary number) is actually correct. It should be noted that it's only one of the many, many correct solutions the equation has, but to be fair to Tyson, none of those lend themselves quite as well to a Boastful Rap.

    Western Animation

• Futurama:
  • In the first season episode "Mars University" Fry signs up for the Professor's course, entitled "The Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields" which Fry mishears as "Wonton Burrito Meals". When Fry finally turns up to the class he finds the Professor teaching complete nonsense, using an illustration named Witten's Dog to explain why electrons taste like grapeade (a parody of Schrödinger's cat). This is especially amusing when you consider that earlier in the episode the Professor himself refers to genetic engineering as "preposterous science-fiction mumbo-jumbo".
  • The Professor also claimed that the name itself was an E=MC Hammer; he just made up some imposing-sounding nonsense so that no one would take his class, because he's a professor and doesn't know how to teach, and indeed Fry's motivation for taking the course is apparently because Professor Farnsworth is teaching it.
  • Bender has a box of P and a box of nP in his closet.
  • When Bender first meets Flexo, they find it greatly amusing that both of them have serial numbers expressible as a sum of two cubes, an allusion to the Hardy-Ramanujan number.
  • In one episode, Bender is terrified when the number 666 mysteriously appears on the wall... in binary. But since it's written backwards, not until he sees it in a mirror.
  • Bender also freaks out over a dream where he thought he saw the number 2. Fortunately, Fry is right there to reassure Bender there's no such thing as 2.
  • Loew's Aleph-naught-Plex
  • One of the most awesome(ly geeky) parts of the entire series is a half hour extra on the first movie's DVD, where the writing crew bring in a mathematician to explain some of the math jokes in the series to the viewer.
  • Ken Keeler, one of the writers, is a gifted mathematician, and, in "The Prisoner of Benda", the "Freaky Friday" Flip episode, he successfully created and proved a new mathematical formula that proves how no matter how many body swaps happened in a group, everyone can be brought back to their proper bodies using only two new people, without having to repeat any particular body swaps (which, in the context of the episode, is something that can't be done). Read more about it here.
  • In "Benderama", Bender replicates himself into grey goo, the Professor puts up an equation for the total mass of the Benders as the successive generations replicate, and all the employees (except Fry, of course) understand it and gasp because it doesn't converge. Being Futurama, this equation actually IS a mathematical representation of the infinite series at hand, which grows indefinitely rather than converges.
• The PJs actually used the trope title in-context. When Thurgood is attempting to prepare to go back to school, a neighbor helps him catch up on his science. The neighbor writes "E=MC___" on the board, and Thurgood subsequently writes in "Hammer". After a second attempt, he writes in "Nuggets" (geddit?)
• In the Teen Titans episode "Stranded", when Cyborg is explaining to Beast Boy how to fix the crashed T-ship a string of mathematical symbols emerges from his mouth — the point being that Beast Boy does not understand science. But the symbols themselves are in fact a mathematically accurate series expansion.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The blackboard ◊ in Cheerilee's classroom features an equation that, while meaningless, resembles those seen in an undergraduate-level course on electromagnetics. Odd, considering that everything else points to the students being more like elementary school kids. A relatively good approximation of a Newtonian description of orbital mechanics appear on Cheerilee's chalkboard as well.
  • In "It's About Time", Twilight writes the formulae for time dilation on her blackboard, mostly at least; she crashes and burns computing the integral, but at least they're valid mathematical expressions. The formula is all variables with no actual numbers, because at that point, Twilight still hadn't figured out how it worked yet.
  • In "Slice of Life", Doctor is asked to compete in a bowling tournament in return for getting a suit fixed. He glances at the pins and the screen is filled with equations, all of which are completely relevant to the task at hand. ◊
• Animaniacs has the Einstein episode:
  • Einstein is inspired when Yakko, Wakko, and Dot sing the ACME Song and Wakko writes it backwards, with the "a" resembling a "2", resulting in Emc2. Al merely added an "=" between the "E" and "m".
  • The board was filled with calculations that Einstein had given up on in frustration... one of them being "H₂O=WET".
• In the Regular Show episode Video 101, Eileen is seen solving a complex-looking problem in advanced calculus. The problem is a triple integral that converts from cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates, exactly the kind of problem you'd see in a Calculus III class.
• Inverted by Rick and Morty, where every time we see Morty's math problems, they appear to be basic single-digit addition and subtraction problems. This is despite Morty being in high school, too.
• One Peppa Pig episode has Peppa and George visit Daddy Pig at work, and his whiteboard features the quadratic equation.
• In one Uncle Grandpa short "Uncle Grandpa sings the Classics" featured a rather complicated math problem.

    Real Life

• Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman speculated in The God Particle that physicists in trouble could write the number 137 on a sign and expect other physicists to come to their assistance. The reason: 137 is (very close to) the reciprocal of alpha, the fine structure constant, and one of the most arbitrary-seeming constants in physics. ^note This is because alpha is "dimensionless" which means it comes out the same no matter which units of measure you use. A simple example is the ratio between the electrical charge of an electron and that of a down-quark, which is exactly 3:1 no matter which units you use for measuring charge. Similarly, alpha is the square of the ratio between the charge of an electron and the "Planck charge" (which is a property of free space). However, whereas it is easy to assume that there is some simple mathematical reason for the ratio 3:1 — even without knowing what that reason is — it is appreciably harder to imagine how the pure mathematical structure of the Theory-Of-Everything could force 1/alpha to be exactly 137-and-a-bit. Many have lost their way trying to prove it was exactly 137 before it was measured more accurately...

Sean's Candy Equation

Sean made up an equation for Halloween trick-or-treating: T = H + C^2, where T is treats, H is houses, and C is costumes, with the exponent 2 being good ones.

Alternative Title(s): Radicals Are Radical, E Equals MC Escher

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EEqualsMCHammer

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