Reading the Comics, January 8, 2015: Rerun-Heavy Edition

I couldn’t think of what connective theme there might be to the mathematically-themed comic strips of the last couple days. It finally struck me: there’s a lot of reruns in this. That’ll do. Most of them are reruns from before I started writing about comics so much in these parts.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes for the 5th of January (a rerun, of course, from the 7th of January, 1986) is a kid-resisting-the-test joke. The particular form is trying to claim a religious exemption from mathematics tests. I sometimes see attempts to claim that mathematics is a kind of religion since, after all, you have to believe it’s true. I’ll grant that you do have to assume some things without proof. Those are the rules of logical inference, and the axioms of the field, particularly. But I can’t make myself buy a definition of “religion” that’s just “something you believe”.

But there are religious overtones to a lot of mathematics. The field promises knowable universal truths, things that are true regardless of who and in what context might know them. And the study of mathematical infinity seems to inspire thoughts of God. Amir D Aczel’s The Mystery Of The Aleph: Mathematics, The Kabbala, and the Search for Infinity is a good read on the topic. Addition is still not a kind of religion, though.

Bud Grace’s The Piranha Club for the 6th of January, 2015.

Bud Grace’s The Piranha Club for the 6th of January uses the ability to do arithmetic as proof of intelligence. It’s a kind of intelligence, sure. There’s fun to be had in working out a square root in your head, or on paper. But there’s really no need for it now that we’ve got calculator technology, except for what it teaches you about how to compute.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 6th of June is an installment of A Voice From Another Dimension. It’s just what the title suggests, and of course it would have to be a three-panel comic. The idea that creatures could live in more, or fewer, dimensions of space is a captivating one. It’s challenging to figure how it could work, though. Spaces of one or two dimensions don’t seem like they would allow biochemistry to work. And, as I understand it, chemistry itself seems unlikely to work right in four or more dimensions of space too. But it’s still fun to think about.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 7th of January is a counting-number joke. It does encourage asking whether numbers are created or discovered, which is a tough question. Counting numbers like “four” are so familiar and so apparently universal that they don’t seem to be constructs. (Even if they are, animals have an understanding of at least small counting numbers like these.) But if “four” is somehow not a human construct, then what about “4,000, 000,000, 000,000, 000,000, 000,000, 000,000”, a number so large it’s hard to think of something we have that many of that we can visualize. And even if that is, “one fourth” seems a bit different from that, and “four i” — the number which, squared, gives us negative 16 — seems qualitatively different. But if they’re constructs, then why do they correspond well to things we can see in the real world?

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 7th of January, 2016. The link will likely expire around mid-February.

Greg Curfman’s Meg Classics for the 7th of January originally ran the 19th of September, 1997. It’s about a kid distractingly interested in multiplication. You get these sometimes. My natural instinct is to put the bigger number first and the smaller number second in a multiplication. “2 times 27” makes me feel nervous in a way “27 times 2” never will.

Hector D Cantu and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 8th of January is a rerun from 2011. It’s an old arithmetic joke. I wouldn’t be surprised if George Burns and Gracie Allen did it. (Well, a little surprised. Gracie Allen didn’t tend to play quite that kind of dumb. But everybody tells some jokes that are a little out of character.)