Reading the Comics, September 1, 2017: Getting Ready For School Edition

In the United States at least it’s the start of the school year. With that, Comic Strip Master Command sent orders to do back-to-school jokes. They may be shallow ones, but they’re enough to fill my need for content. For example:

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 27th of August, a new strip, has Jason fitting his writing tools to the class’s theme. So mathematics gets to write “2” in a complicated way. The mention of a clay tablet and cuneiform is oddly timely, given the current (excessive) hype about that Babylonian tablet of trigonometric values, which just shows how even a nearly-retired cartoonist will get lucky sometimes.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 27th does a collage of school stuff, with mathematics the leading representative of the teacher-giving-a-lecture sort of class.

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 28th uses calculus as the emblem of stuff that would be put on the blackboard and be essential for knowing. It’s legitimate formulas, so far as we get to see, the stuff that would in fact be in class. It’s also got an amusing, to me at least, idea for getting students’ attention onto the blackboard.

Tony Carrillo’s F Minus for the 29th is here to amuse me. I could go on to some excuse about how the sextant would be used for the calculations that tell someone where he is. But really I’m including it because I was amused and I like how detailed a sketch of a sextant Carrillo included here.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 29th features the rich obscenity Sedgwick Nuttingham III, also getting ready for school. In this case the summer mathematics tutoring includes some not-really-obvious game dubbed Integer Ball. I confess a lot of attempts to make games out of arithmetic look to me like this: fun to do but useful in practicing skills? But I don’t know what the rules are or what kind of game might be made of the integers here. I should at least hear it out.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 30th lists a top ten greatest numbers, spoofing on mindless clickbait. Cavna also, I imagine unintentionally, duplicates an ancient David Letterman Top Ten List. But it’s not like you can expect people to resist the idea of making numbered lists of numbers. Some of us have a hard time stopping.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 1st of September, 2017. So Paul Dirac introduced to quantum mechanics a mathematical construct known as the ‘braket’. It’s written as a pair of terms, like, < A | B > . These can be separated into pieces, with < A | called the ‘bra’ and | B > the ‘ket’. We’re told in the quantum mechanics class that this was a moment of possibly “innocent” overlap between what’s a convenient mathematical name and, as a piece of women’s clothing, unending amusement to male physics students. I do not know whether that’s so. I don’t see the thrill myself except in the suggestion that great physicists might be aware of women’s clothing.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 1st of September mentions a bunch of mathematics as serious studies. Also, to an extent, non-serious studies. I don’t remember my childhood well enough to say whether we found that vaguely-defined thrill in the word “algebra”. It seems plausible enough.

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