A boy in a white bear-eared hat cheers with both arms up beside a chalkboard of loopy scribbles on a candy-coloured hilltop, a stretchy yellow dog bounding beside him.

Original artwork, not a still

Finn the Human

Mathematical!

— Adventure Time • 2010

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

It is Finn's all-purpose word for excellent: nonsense praise that sounds like homework. Using school maths as slang fits a show full of kids who are hopeless at it, and the series even has the pair failing at a simple sum. Fans use it to cheer a good idea and as a nod to the show's gentle, silly register.

Context reviewed

In context

Spoilers for Adventure TimeShow the scene

"Mathematical!" is one of the exclamations Finn throws around in the original Adventure Time short, which aired on 11 January 2007 as part of Frederator's Random! Cartoons on Nicktoons and went viral online. In the short the boy hero is still named Pen. He and Jake have just jumped into the Ice Kingdom and ridden a horde of penguins down a mountain on their way to rescue Princess Bubblegum from the Ice King; he shouts the word at the end of the slide, and Jake agrees that it was totally math. It sits among his other made-up praise words, "Algebraic" and "Rhombus". When the series proper began in 2010, Finn and Jake kept using math terms as catchphrases and as stand-ins for swearing.

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