Maybe there is no pattern to how Comic Strip Master Command directs the making of mathematics-themed comic strips. It hasn’t quite been a week since I had enough to gather up again. But it’s clearly the summertime anyway; the most common theme this time seems to be just that mathematics is some hard stuff, without digging much into particular subjects. I can work with that.
Pab Sungenis’s The New Adventures of Queen Victoria (July 19) brings in Erwin Schrödinger and his in-strip cat Barfly for a knock-knock joke about proof, with Andrew Wiles’s name dropped probably because he’s the only person who’s gotten to be famous for a mathematical proof. Wiles certainly deserves fame for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem and opening up what I understand to be a useful new field for mathematical research (Fermat’s Last Theorem by itself is nice but unimportant; the tools developed to prove it, though, that’s worthwhile), but remembering only Wiles does slight Richard Taylor, whose help Wiles needed to close a flaw in his proof.
Incidentally I don’t know why the cat is named Barfly. It has the feel to me of a name that was a punchline for one strip and then Sungenis felt stuck with it. As Thomas Dye of the web comic Newshounds said, “Joke names’ll kill you”. (I’m inclined to think that funny names can work, as the Marx Brotehrs, Fred Allen, and Vic and Sade did well with them, but they have to be a less demanding kind of funny.)
John Deering’s Strange Brew (July 19) uses a panel full of mathematical symbols scrawled out as the representation of “this is something really hard being worked out”. I suppose this one could also be filed under “rocket science themed comics”, but it comes from almost the first problem of mathematical physics: if you shoot something straight up, how long will it take to fall back down? The faster the thing starts up, the longer it takes to fall back, until at some speed — the escape velocity — it never comes back. This is because the size of the gravitational attraction between two things decreases as they get farther apart. At or above the escape velocity, the thing has enough speed that all the pulling of gravity, from the planet or moon or whatever you’re escaping from, will not suffice to slow the thing down to a stop and make it fall back down.
The escape velocity depends on the size of the planet or moon or sun or galaxy or whatever you’re escaping from, of course, and how close to the surface (or center) you start from. It also assumes you’re talking about the speed when the thing starts flying away, that is, that the thing doesn’t fire rockets or get a speed boost by flying past another planet or anything like that. And things don’t have to reach the escape velocity to be useful. Nothing that’s in earth orbit has reached the earth’s escape velocity, for example. I suppose that last case is akin to how you can still get some stuff done without getting out of the recliner.
Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures (July 21) uses mathematics as the standard for proving intelligence exists. I’ve got a vested interest in supporting that proposition, but I can’t bring myself to say more than that it shows a particular kind of intelligence exists. I appreciate the equation of the final panel, though, as it can be pretty well generalized.
Bill Holbrook’s Safe Havens (July 22) plays on mathematics’ reputation of being not very much a crowd-pleasing activity. That’s all right, although I think Holbrook makes a mistake by having the arena claim to offer a “lecture on the actual odds of beating the casino”, since the mathematics of gambling is just the sort of mathematics I think would draw a crowd. Probability enjoys a particular sweet spot for popular treatment: many problems don’t require great amounts of background to understand, and have results that are surprising, but which have reasons that are easy to follow and don’t require sophisticated arguments, and are about problems that are easy to imagine or easy to find interesting: cards being drawn, dice being rolled, coincidences being found, or secrets being revealed. I understand Holbrook’s editorial cartoon-type point behind the lecture notice he put up, but the venue would have better scared off audiences if it offered a lecture on, say, “Chromatic polynomials for rigidly achiral graphs: new work on Yamada’s invariant”. I’m not sure I could even explain that title in 1200 words.
Missy Meyer’s Holiday Doodles (July 22) revelas to me that apparently the 22nd of July was “Casual Pi Day”. Yeah, I suppose that passes. I didn’t see much about it in my Twitter feed, but maybe I need some more acquaintances who don’t write dates American-fashion.
Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains (July 24) again uses mathematics — particularly, Calculus — as not just the marker for intelligence but also as The Thing which will decide whether a kid goes on to success in life. I think the dolphin (I guess it’s a dolphin?) parent is being particularly horrible here, as it’s not as if a “B+” is in any way a grade to be ashamed of, and telling kids it is either drives them to give up on caring about grades, or makes them send whiny e-mails to their instructors about how they need this grade and don’t understand why they can’t just do some make-up work for it. Anyway, it makes the kid miserable, it makes the kid’s teachers or professors miserable, and for crying out loud, it’s a B+.
(I’m also not sure whether a dolphin would consider a career at Sea World success in life, but that’s a separate and very sad issue.)
nebusresearch 
I take Holbrook’s point not as “math is unpopular” but as “math is an anathema to gamblers” — because it demonstrates that their behavior is irrational, while they prefer to hold on to superstition and vain hope.
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I think that you’re right about Holbrook’s point.
But I suspect the claimed lecture title would still attract gamblers, out of a belief that if they knew a little more about how the industry works then they’d be able to beat the house. The belief may be irrational but it’s hard to fight, and sometimes (as with various Blackjack card-counting schemes) it even pays out.
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My friend Vanessa put casual pi day in her Facebook feed. Does that help? I didn’t know about this before this year. I can get you guys to friend each other if need be. She’s also a math prof.
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Helps some, sure. I don’t have any particular reason to disapprove of Casual Pi day, ahouth I suppose it’s worse-timed for fitting into classes than the fourteenth of March will be.
And, thank you, although I haven’t gotten on Facebook yet. I’m still getting Twitter to make sense, I’m afraid.
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Oh, and I’m so glad I guessed my wordpress password… hmmm maybe it’s not too secure after all…
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Well, if nobody else guessed it first, that’s as secure as it needs to be, isn’t it?
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“Barfly” looks like “Garfield” – isn’t that a copyright issue? (I did not research any background, such as if both cartoons are perhaps created by the same illustrator so it is maybe a stupid comment…)
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Yeah, “Barfly” is just Garfield, and there’s no connection I’m aware of between the Queen Victoria cartoonist and the Garfield owners. Possibly Pab Sugenis uses an image that was given out for free use for publicity purposes. Possibly the original use of the character was for satirical purposes (I could easily imagine making a joke about Garfield repeating the same pose for the characters over and over, since the comic strip does do that), which would make Barfly at least start out as a fair use. Possibly Sugenis just figures, if they were going to sue him, they’d have done it by now, so what’s he got to lose? Those big web-cartoonist paychecks?
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