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I happened upon an image on the Internet

weird math 1
(source: news.com.au)

and I wondered whether the math on the chalkboard means anything. Using Google's image search, I found three other related images.

weird math 2

weird math 3

weird math 4
(source: nees.org)

Piecing together the math from the various angles shows some mismatched grouping symbols.

My question: Ignoring the possible typos, does the "math" mean anything? Or is this an example of stock photography trying to appear mathy?

Community
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Tim Thayer
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  • It's almost an integral, but written weirdly. –  May 22 '15 at 16:26
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    Looks like someone copied something they didn't understand. If instead of the curly bracket ${$ they had written an integral sign $\int$, then they appear to be something like the formulae for Fourier series/transform. – Simon S May 22 '15 at 16:26
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    You'd have to ask the guy pointing very proudly at $$1/PI\big{_{-\infty}^\infty\ f(t) \sin ty\ dt,$$ I think he just discovered its meaning. – pjs36 May 22 '15 at 16:28
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    So the best suggestion is to replace ${$ with $\int$ and $PI$ with $\pi$. – Hagen von Eitzen May 22 '15 at 16:50
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    I remember I have seen an OCR software which have mistaken the integral sign $\int$ as the parenthesis when extracting math from old book. So the { part doesn't look too strange to me. In fact, the $acy |$ on the second line also looks like an OCR mistake to me (the original should be $a(y)$). – achille hui May 22 '15 at 17:05
  • The most amazing thing here is that the answer saying "No it does not mean anything" has +18... Seems reasonable! – Winther May 22 '15 at 17:22
  • Honestly, that the stock photographer setting up the shoot didn't have the wherewithal to change PI to $\pi$ is the most amusing part. One gets the impression that the photographer has had one or two demanding clients in their day. – Emily May 22 '15 at 17:44
  • @achillehui Nice call on the OCR idea. – Tim Thayer May 23 '15 at 18:13

2 Answers2

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It's safe to say that the math doesn't mean anything. No branch of mathematics or science or anything else uses the symbol $\{$ for an integral sign, and there are mismatched parentheses.

hunter
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Googling fourier "a(y)" "b(y)" yields this first hit:

Fourier Integral of the function f(x)

grand_chat
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