Reading the Comics, June 30, 2015: Fumigating The Theater Edition

One of my favorite ever episodes of The Muppet Show when I was a kid had the premise the Muppet Theater was being fumigated and so they had to put on a show from the train station instead. (It was the Loretta Lynn episode, third season, number eight.) I loved seeing them try to carry on as normal when not a single thing was as it should be. Since then — probably before, too, but I don’t remember that — I’ve loved seeing stuff trying to carry on in adverse circumstances.

Why this is mentioned here is that Sunday night my computer had a nasty freeze and some video card mishaps. I discovered that my early-2011 MacBook Pro might be among those recalled earlier this year for a service glitch. My computer is in for what I hope is a simple, free, and quick repair. But obviously I’m not at my best right now. I might be even longer than usual answering people and goodness knows how the statistics survey of June will go.

Anyway. Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues (June 26) is a joke about motivating kids to do mathematics. And about how you can’t do mathematics over summer vacation.

Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues for the 26th of June, 2015.

Ruben Bolling’s Tom The Dancing Bug (June 26) features a return appearance of Chaos Butterfly. Chaos Butterfly does what Chaos Butterfly does best.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Begins (June 26; actually just the Peanuts of March 23, 1951) uses arithmetic as a test of smartness. And as an example of something impractical.

Alex Hallatt’s Arctic Circle (June 28) is a riff on the Good Will Hunting premise. That movie’s particular premise — the janitor solves an impossible problem left on the board — is, so far as I know, something that hasn’t happened. But it’s not impossible. Training will help one develop reasoning ability. Training will provide context and definitions and models to work from. But that’s not essential. All that’s essential is the ability to reason. Everyone has that ability; everyone can do mathematics. Someone coming from outside the academy could do first-rate work. However, I’d bet on the person with the advanced degree in mathematics. There is value in training.

Alex Hallatt’s Arctic Circle for the 28th of June, 2015.

But as many note, the Good Will Hunting premise has got a kernel of truth in it. In 1939, George Dantzig, a grad student in mathematics at University of California/Berkeley, came in late to class. He didn’t know that two problems on the board were examples of unproven theorems, and assumed them to be homework. So he did them, though he apologized for taking so long to do them. Before you draw too much inspiration from this, though, remember that Dantzig was a graduate student almost ready to start work on a PhD thesis. And the problems were not thought unsolvable, just conjectures not yet proven. Snopes, as ever, provides some explanation of the legend and some of the variant ways the story is told.

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic In A Minute (June 28) shows off a magic trick that you could recast as a permutations problem. If you’ve been studying group theory, and many of my Mathematics A To Z terms have readied you for group theory, you can prove why this trick works.

Guy Gilchrist’s Nancy (June 28) carries on Baby Blues‘s theme of mathematics during summer vacation being simply undoable.

Piers Baker’s Ollie and Quentin for December 28, 2014, and repeated on June 28, 2015.

Piers Baker’s Ollie and Quentin (June 28) is a gambler’s fallacy-themed joke. It was run — on ComicsKingdom, back then — back in December, and I talked some more about it then.

Mike Twohy’s That’s Life (June 28) is about the perils of putting too much attention into mental arithmetic. It’s also about how perilously hypnotic decimals are: if the pitcher had realized “fourteen million over three years” must be “four and two-thirds million per year” he’d surely have been less distracted.