About

Zach Galifianakis Math refers to an image of actor Zach Galifianakis from The Hangover thinking hard as math equations fly by his head, similar to the Math Lady meme. The image in both still and GIF form is often used as a reaction image in response to confusing content and is also used in image macros to similarly depict confusion.

Origin

On June 5th, 2009, The Hangover was released in North America. In one scene in the film, Alan, a dumb character played by Zach Galifianakis, reads a book about counting cards in blackjack. Galifianakis uses these skills from the book at a blackjack table, represented by his eyes darting around the table as math equations fly by his head (shown below).

On August 31st, 2014, the scene was converted into a GIF and uploaded to Imgur^[1] titled "MR tying to calculate how many times i'm going to have to beat it tonight," gaining over 1.2 million views in seven years (shown below).

Spread

The image became a prominent reaction image and image macro over the course of the mid-to-late 2010s. For example, on February 18th, 2015, Redditor Coaz posted the GIF to /r/reactiongifs^[2] titled "MRW My girlfriend says 'You know why I'm mad,'" gaining over 13,200 upvotes in six months. This is a common joke applied to the image seen in other examples.^[3] On September 1st, 2016, an Imgur^[4] user posted another meme using the image to express confusion (shown below).

On January 16th, 2017, Tumblr^[5] user ruinedchildhood posted a series of tweets where someone suggests "15 squared is 30," gaining over 335,000 notes in four years (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References