Every now and then a phrase pops into my head and won’t leave until I write it down or tell it to someone else.

One day the little voice in my head suggested putting “Didn’t” before the classic series of maths textbooks, Graduate Texts in Mathematics.

So I found a cover of a GTIM book, stuck “Didn’t” on the front and changed the title to an in-joke about not understanding category theory, and was happy with my life.

But then I thought that it would make sense to make a whole series of these, so I spent a couple of hours making a meme generator.

And then I tooted and tweeted it.

It looks like this struck a chord with anyone else who’s ever seen one of these books and been like “🤷” – the tweet got just over 2,000 likes, and a tonne of replies giving variations on the format.

Here are some I particularly liked:

And this version by Davide Castelvecchi currently has just under 20,000 likes!

So that was a good bit of fun.

Have a go at making your own, why not?