I don’t mean to complain, because it really is a lot of fun to do these comic strip roundups, but Comic Strip Master Command has been sending a flood of comics my way. I hope it’s not overwhelming readers, or me. The downside of the great number of mathematics-themed comics this past week has been that they aren’t very deep examples, but, what the heck. Many of them are interesting anyway. As usual I’m including examples of the Comics Kingdom and the Creators.com comics because I’m not yet confident how long those links remain visible to non-subscribers.
Mike Peters’ Mother Goose and Grimm (June 23) presents the cavemen-inventing-stuff pattern and the invention of a “science-fictiony” number. This is amusing, sure, but the dynamic is historically valid: it does seem like the counting numbers (1, 2, 3, and so on) were more or less intuitive, but negative numbers? Rationals? Irrationals? Zero? They required development and some fairly sophisticated reasoning to think of. You get a hint of the suspicion with which the newly-realized numbers were viewed when you think of the connotations of terms like “complex” numbers, or “imaginary” numbers, or even “negative” numbers. For that matter, Arabic numerals required some time for Europeans — who were comfortable with Roman numerals — to feel comfortable with; histories of mathematics will mention how Arabic numerals were viewed with suspicion and sometimes banned as being too easy for merchants or bankers to use to defraud customers who didn’t know what the symbols meant or how to use them.
Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains (June 23) also takes us to the dawn of time and the invention of the calendar. Calendars are deeply intwined with mathematics, as they typically try to reconcile several things that aren’t quite perfectly reconcilable: the changes of the season, the cycles of the moon, the position of the sun in the sky, the length of the day. But the attempt to do as well as possible, using rules easy enough for normal human beings to understand, is productive.
Mark Pett’s Lucky Cow (June 23, rerun) lets Neil do some accounting the modern old-fashioned way. I trust there are abacus applications out there; somewhere in my pile of links I had a Javascript-based slide rule simulator, after all. I never quite got abacus use myself.
Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark (June 23) shows off one of those little hazards of skywriting and mathematical symbols. I admit the context threw me; I had to look again to read the birds as the less-than sign.
Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie (June 24) has resident nerd Dilton Doiley pondering the vastness of the sky and the number of stars and feel the sense of wonder that inspires. The mind being filled with ever-increasing wonder and awe isn’t a unique sentiment, and thinking hard of very large, very numerous things is one of the paths to that sensation. Jughead has a similar feeling, evidently.
Mort Walker (“Addison”)’s Boner’s Ark (June 26, originally run July 31, 1968) features once again the motif of “a bit of calculus proves someone is really smart”. The orangutan’s working out of a derivative starts out well, too, using the product rule correctly through the first three lines, a point at which the chain rule and the derivative of the arccotangent function conspire to make things look really complicated. I admit I’m impressed Walker went to the effort to get things right that far in and wonder where he got the derivative worked out. It’s not one of the standard formulas you’d find in every calculus textbook, although you might find it as one of the more involved homework problem for Calculus I.
Mark Pett’s Lucky Cow comes up again (June 26, rerun) sees Neil a little gloomy at the results of a test coming back “negative”, a joke I remember encountering on The Office (US) too. It brings up the question of why, given the connotations of the words, a “positive” test result is usually a bad thing and a “negative” one a good, and it back to the language of statistics. Normally a test — medical, engineering, or otherwise — is really checking to see how often some phenomenon occurs within a given sample. But the phenomenon will normally happen a little bit anyway, even if nothing untoward is happening. It also won’t normally happen at exactly the same rate, even if there’s nothing to worry about. What statistics asks, then, is, “is this phenomenon happening so much in this sample space that it’s not plausible for it to just be coincidence?” And in that context, yeah, everything being normal is the negative result. What happens isn’t suspicious. Of course, Neil has other issues, here.
Chip Dunham’s Overboard (June 26) plays on the fact that “half” does have a real proper meaning, but will get used pretty casually when people aren’t being careful. Or when dinner’s involved.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy (June 26, rerun) must have originally run in March sometime, and it does have Skippy and the other kid arguing about how many months it is until Christmas. Counting intervals like this does invite what’s termed a “fencepost error”, and the kids present it perfectly: do you count the month you’re in if you want to count how many months until something? There isn’t really an absolutely correct answer, though; you and the other party just have to agree on whether you mean, say, the pages on the calendar you’ll go through between today and Christmas, or whether you mean how many more times you’ll pass the 24th of the month until you get to Christmas. You will see this same dynamic in every argument about conventions ever. Two spaces after the end of the sentence.
In Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie (June 27, rerun), Moose has a pretty good answer to how to get the whole algebra book read in time. It’d be nice if it quite worked that way.
Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures (June 27) has the characters working out just what the calculations for a jump into hyperspace would be. I admit I’ve always wondered just what the calculations for that sort of thing are, but that’s a bit silly of me.
nebusresearch 
LOL – love the first one: “Now, you’re getting science-fictiony.”
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