He wore round tortoiseshell glasses and a black T-shirt printed with a grotesquely complex integral equation. Above and below the equation, the shirt asked in large letters: WHAT PART OF [this gobbledygook] DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? The shirt was a metajoke, he explained to me. The gobbledygook was one of Maxwell’s equations; the joke part, of course, was that no average person would understand the thing at all; the meta part, I think, was that Maxwell’s equations are famous but so notoriously abstruse that even a mathematician might not recognize this one. Get it?
LMAO
