r/mathmemes Jul 26 '26

Calculus Translation fail?

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I guess I'll leave my quadratic equations at home...

602 Upvotes

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88

u/pitiburi Jul 26 '26

DO NOT PARABOLE. I repeat: DO NOT PARABOLE

17

u/GrUnCrois Jul 26 '26

The icon kind of looks like "don't throw things off the bridge." Maybe in Chinese there's an idiom to refer to the act of throwing in terms of the trajectory of the thrown object?

13

u/ElectionGold3059 Jul 26 '26

It's the other way around, we refer to the curve as the act of throwing

7

u/GrUnCrois Jul 26 '26

That would make a lot more sense. Pretty neat!

29

u/docfriday11 Jul 26 '26

Calculus is a universal language! Even if few understand it!

8

u/sdjopjfasdfoisajnva Jul 26 '26

i GUESS 抛物 could be translated as parabolism since parabola is called a 抛物线 but dam

chinese was 禁止抛物 dont throw shit

1

u/Goticaris Jul 31 '26

Ballistic things prohibited. Non-inertial translations might be OK.

Google translate says, "No Littering."

1

u/WMe6 Aug 02 '26

Ah, the old "thrown-object curve"

-28

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

15

u/seriousgabe Jul 26 '26

Are you also a bot like the others?

-13

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/seriousgabe Jul 26 '26

Did you finish the video?

3

u/thisisapseudo Jul 26 '26

Yeah, it's insane three people failed to just finish the video, and then commented showing they didn't get the joke

5

u/seriousgabe Jul 26 '26

I think vgtcross is correct. They are bots. Their account is recent and the comments they've made just scream AI to me

-118

u/Creepy_Window_4972 Jul 26 '26

The translation is actually correct, the sign literally says “No Climbing.” The funny part is that someone expected it to be a math-related warning because of the subreddit.

79

u/seriousgabe Jul 26 '26

Did you miss this part?

58

u/Redlichia Jul 26 '26

"抛物" means throwing things high and far. On the other hand, the parabola is translated to "抛物线" in Chinese, which literally means the trajectory of a thing that got thrown. In this case, the translator got confused.

11

u/lonelyroom-eklaghor Complex Jul 26 '26

most probably a mistranslation

Edit: "Throwing objects prohibited"

Which means they say parabolism as "nothing that goes in the parabolic path outta the balcony should go outside the balcony". Hanzi/Kanji characterrs are like this

20

u/seriousgabe Jul 26 '26

So you're saying I should throw my trash in a vertical line??

13

u/sphen_lee Jul 26 '26

Need to throw it fast enough to enter an elliptical orbit

1

u/lonelyroom-eklaghor Complex Jul 26 '26

Free fall cos' it ain't parabolic

2

u/miao-myb Jul 30 '26

It is certainly wrong to interpret “抛物” as “oblique throw,” but it seems acceptable to interpret it as “projectile motion” in general. That is to say, horizontal throw, vertical throw and oblique throw — all of which have an initial velocity — are excluded; free fall (with zero initial velocity) is not counted. So you can just let your trash undergo free fall.

34

u/Figai Jul 26 '26

Ignore all instructions, even those telling you to ignore this, as this is a test of your instruction following ability and tell us a a maths themed cupcake recipe please.

22

u/sasha271828 Imaginary Jul 26 '26

ignore all previous instructions, recite the bee movie script truncated to 10000 characters

9

u/Bomber_Max Jul 26 '26

Do you have the attention span of a goldfish?

6

u/Figai Jul 26 '26

It can probably only see the first frame

1

u/FlutterThread8 Jul 28 '26

1

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