Basic Trope: Calculus is treated in-universe as incomprehensibly advanced math.
- Straight: When Alice starts talking about derivatives, everyone else reacts like she's speaking a foreign language.
- Exaggerated: Alice starts talking about long division and is asked to go easy on the mathematical Techno Babble.
- Downplayed: Real analysis is arcane knowledge.note
- Justified: The work is aimed at children or younger teens, who probably don't understand calculus.
- Inverted:
- The work uses calculus concepts and terms in its Exposition scenes, such that viewers who aren't proficient in calculus will have no idea what's going on.
- Ordinary High-School Student Alice has to study for a test on algebraic topology. This is treated in-universe as a normal (if particularly stress-inducing) part of a high school curriculum.
- Subverted: Alice shows her friends her notes which contain derivatives, and they're all baffled... because they can't read her handwriting.
- Double Subverted: After she translates out loud, Bob asks "...what's a derivative?"
- Parodied: The "mystical ritual incantations" used by the work's wizards are simply excerpts from a high school calculus textbook.
- Averted: Calculus is treated as the most advanced part of the standard high school math curriculum and no more.
- Enforced: Executives insist writers treat calculus as an unknowable mystery so as not to risk making any of the audience uncomfortable with their own lack of calculus knowledge.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Insufferable Genius Alice deliberately explains her ideas as incomprehensibly as possible so people will be more impressed with her ability to understand such complex mathematics. In reality, anyone who passed a high school calculus class would be able to follow if she'd explained better.
- Exploited: Calculus is used by spies as a form of secret code, since they know people will be too intimidated to even try to wrap their heads around it.
- Defied:
- Bob asks himself whether calculus can really be that mysterious, given how many high school students learn it each year.
- Cool Teacher Charlie helps students realize they can learn calculus even if they're not geniuses, despite how fiction may have made it seem.
- Discussed: "Why does everyone act like I'm showing them a passage from the Necronomicon every time they see an integral sign?"
- Conversed: "Hang on, pause it here... that's just high school calculus! Why are they all treating it like some secret genius knowledge?"
- Implied: ???
- Deconstructed: This trope is the first sign that the characters live in a Crapsack World where math education has degraded severely or is only available to a small elite. This has led to consequences like unsafe buildings and collapsing bridges, since there are few people with the mathematical knowledge to design sturdy infrastructure.
- Reconstructed: The world is normal, our heroes are just Book Dumb, hence why they consider calculus arcane knowledge. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of saving the day.
- Played For Laughs: Characters react with progressively more exaggerated horror every time calculus is mentioned.
- Played For Drama: Alice begins to resent her friends for their unwillingness to even try to understand what she's working on. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast starts to see Alice as an aloof ivory-tower egghead who will never truly relate to them.
- Played for Horror: Alice is talking to her fellow math majors. Their reactions reveal to her and the audience that they've fallen victim to the Puppeteer Parasite monsters menacing their campus, and she's now the Final Girl.
Back to Calculus Is Arcane Knowledge
