Reading the Comics, June 21, 2015: Blatantly Padded Edition, Part 2

I said yesterday I was padding one mathematics-comics post into two for silly reasons. And I was. But there were enough Sunday comics on point that splitting one entry into two has turned out to be legitimate. Nice how that works out sometimes.

Mason Mastroianni, Mick Mastroianni, and Perri Hart’s B.C. (June 19) uses mathematics as something to heap upon a person until they yield to your argument. It’s a fallacious way to argue, but it does work. Even at a mathematical conference the terror produced by a screen full of symbols can chase follow-up questions away. On the 21st, they present mathematics as a more obviously useful thing. Well, mathematics with a bit of physics.

Nate Frakes’s Break Of Day (June 19) is this week’s anthropomorphic algebra joke.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 20th of June, 2015.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem (June 20) is captioned “Life at the Quantum Level”. And it’s built on the idea that quantum particles could be in multiple places at once. Whether something can be in two places at once depends on coming up with a clear idea about what you mean by “thing” and “places” and for that matter “at once”; when you try to pin the ideas down they prove to be slippery. But the mathematics of quantum mechanics is fascinating. It cries out for treating things we would like to know about, such as positions and momentums and energies of particles, as distributions instead of fixed values. That is, we know how likely it is a particle is in some region of space compared to how likely it is somewhere else. In statistical mechanics we resort to this because we want to study so many particles, or so many interactions, that it’s impractical to keep track of them all. In quantum mechanics we need to resort to this because it appears this is just how the world works.

(It’s even less on point, but Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 21st of June has a bit of riffing on Schrödinger’s Cat.)

Brian and Ron Boychuk’s Chuckle Brothers (June 20) name-drops algebra as the kind of mathematics kids still living with their parents have trouble with. That’s probably required by the desire to make a joking definition of “aftermath”, so that some specific subject has to be named. And it needs parents to still be watching closely over their kids, something that doesn’t quite fit for college-level classes like Intro to Differential Equations. So algebra, geometry, or trigonometry it must be. I am curious whether algebra reads as the funniest of that set of words, or if it just fits better in the space available. ‘Geometry’ is as long a word as ‘algebra’, but it may not have the same connotation of being an impossibly hard class.

Jimmy Hatlo’s Little Iodine for the 18th of April, 1954, and rerun the 18th of June, 2015.

And from the world of vintage comic strips, Jimmy Hatlo’s Little Iodine (June 21, originally run the 18th of April, 1954) reminds us that anybody can do any amount of arithmetic if it’s something they really want to calculate.

Jeffrey Caulfield and Alexandre Rouillard’s Mustard and Boloney (June 21) is another strip using the idea of mathematics — and particularly word problems — to signify great intelligence. I suppose it’s easier to recognize the form of a word problem than it is to recognize a good paper on the humanities if you only have two dozen words to show it in.

Juba’s Viivi and Wagner (June 21) is a timely reminder that while sudokus may be fun logic puzzles, they are ultimately the puzzle you decide to make of them.