Called a terrorist for doing math: Andy Jiang's in-flight short
The comment section filled about five times faster than a usual first day, and viewers keep coming back to a seatmate who took numbers for a foreign script.
Andy JiangStory of Why this story? The video drew 5,173 comments in its first day, 5.4 times a normal first day on this channel (963).
He Got Called A Terrorist For This 😭
Numbers, not a secret code. That is the twist in "He Got Called A Terrorist For This," Andy Jiang's newest short, and it is what the comment section cannot stop talking about.
As viewers retell it, a woman on a plane watched the man beside her write line after line in what she took for an unfamiliar script, decided it was something sinister and reported him. The writing turned out to be math, and the man an academic working on it before landing. The flight was held up while it was sorted out.
The outline sounds a lot like the case of Guido Menzio, the University of Pennsylvania economist whose differential equations alarmed a seatmate on a 2016 flight out of Philadelphia.
Views over the first day were ordinary for one of Andy's shorts, a little over a million. The conversation was not. More than 5,000 people wrote in within 24 hours. Many point out that a seatmate who would not chat seems to have been part of what tipped her over. Others see plain profiling, and plenty say the people who really had a bad day were the passengers kept waiting.
It fits a channel whose about text promises "interesting, bizarre stories from around the world," and the stories around it this week have been just as odd: a man who speaks every language you can name, an in-game pandemic that seemed to predict real life, and the newest, a man who has looked for his wife 763 times.
Published on Trari
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What viewers say
Bro was just finishing his homework before arriving type bs 😭😭😭
@DommyOrAngieSee it on YouTube
Public comments from the video's page on YouTube
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- Channel
- Andy Jiang
- Subscribers
- 3,480,000 ▲ 10,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 29,198,480
- Channel views, pace per day
- 4,918,126 (on a normal day: 3,690,933)
- Video published
- October 4, 2026
- Video views so far
- 1,358,421 (2 days online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 293,461 (on a normal day: 1,178,432)
The numbers
The views were in line with the channel's usual first day for a short. The comments ran far ahead.
💡 Test your knowledge
The equals sign, a staple of every equation, was introduced in 1557 by which mathematician?
The Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde introduced the sign in his 1557 book The Whetstone of Witte, choosing two parallel lines because no two things could be more equal.
