There won’t be, this week, any mathematically-themed comic strips featuring the long-running, Carl Anderson-created character Henry. You’ll come to see why I find this worth mentioning soon enough. Not today.
Hart, Mastroianni, and Parker’s Wizard of Id for the 2nd features the blackboard full of symbols to represent the difficult and unsolved problem. And sometimes it does seem like it takes magic to solve an equation. That magic usually takes the form of a transformation. That is, we find a way to rewrite the problem as something different, and find that this different problem is solvable. And then that the solution to this altered problem can be transformed into a solution of the original. This is normal magic, the kind any trained mathematician can do, if haltingly. But sometimes it’ll be just a stroke of imaginative genius, solving a problem that seems at first to have nothing to do with the original. This is genius work, and we all hope we can find a problem on which we can do that.
I can also take the strip to represent one of those things I’m curmudgeonly about. That is that I tend to look at big special-effects-laden attempts to make mathematics look beautiful as … well, they’re nice. But I don’t think they help anyone learn how to do anything. So that the Wizard’s work doesn’t actually solve the problem feels true to me.
Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 3rd is an exclusive peek into my experience every time I decide to finally learn non-Euclidean geometry properly.
Mort Walker and Dik Browne’s vintage Hi and Lois for the 3rd sees Chip struggling with mathematics. His father has a noble idea, that it’ll be easier if he tries to see the problems as fun puzzles. Maybe so, but I agree with Chip: there’s not a punch line to 246 ÷ 3. Also, points to Chip for doing that division right away. Clearly he isn’t bad at arithmetic; he just doesn’t like it. We’ve all got things like that.
Hector D Cantu and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 4th is a joke about being helpless with numbers. … Actually, from the phrasing, I’m not positive that Cruz doesn’t mean he got question number 9, or maybe 19, or maybe number 10 wrong. It’s a bit sloppy to not remember which question was, but I certainly know the pain of remembering having done a problem wrong.
My other Reading the Comics posts should appear at this link. Other essays with The Wizard of Id are at this link. More essays with Tiger are at this link. Both current-run and vintage-run Hi and Lois strips are in essays on this link. And Baldo comics should be at this link.
nebusresearch 
Does the Sept 11th Barney Google count as a mathematic comic with Jughead’s formula for a better overall grade?
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I don’t know, but I’m including it in next week’s roster of comics anyway since I’m usually an easy mark for mentions of the New Math.
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Here’s a comic that combines math with kangaroos
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Ooh, thanks. Do like to see kangaroos around.
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