# Reading the Comics, March 14, 2019: Pi Day 2019 Edition

Some weeks there’s an obvious theme. Most weeks there’s not. But mid-March has formed a traditional theme for at least one day. I’m going to excerpt that from the rest of the week’s comics, because I’ve noticed what readership around here is like for stuff tagged “Pi Day” in mid-March. You all can do what you like with your pop-mathematics blogs.

Pi Day seems to have brought out fewer comics than in years past. The ones that were made, among the set I read, were also less on point. There was a lot of actual physical pie involved, too, suggesting the day might be escaping the realm of pop-mathematics silliness straight into pun nobody thinks about. Or maybe cartoonists just didn’t have a fresh angle this year.

John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee shows off a nerd kind of mistake. At least one I think of as particularly nerdy. Wanting to calculate is a natural urge, especially for those who do it well. But to calculate the circumference of a pie from its diameter? What is exciting about that? More, does Grandpa recognize what a circumference is? It’s relatively easy to see the diameter of a pie. Area, also. But circumference? I’m not sure people are good at estimating the circumference of things, not by sight. You’d need a tape measure, or a similar flexible ruler, to start with and we don’t see that. Without the chance to measure it himself, Grandpa has to take the circumference (and, for that matter, diameter) at Edison Lee’s word. What would convince Grandpa of anything?

For example, even if Grandpa accepted that Edison Lee had multiplied one number by 3.14 and gotten another number he might ask: how do we know pi is the same for pies of all sizes? Could a small pie’s circumference be only three times the diameter’s length, while a large pie’s is four times that? Could Edison offer an answer for why 3.14, or some nearby number, is all that interesting?

Liz Climo’s Cartoons is an example of the second kind of strip I mentioned during my introductory paragraphs. While it’s nominally built on Pi Day, any mathematics is gone. It’s just about the pun. And, well, the fun of having a capybara around.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark is the most on-topic strip for the day. And the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the day, too. It’s built on there being infinitely many digits to π, which, true enough. There are also infinitely many digits to $\frac{1}{3}$, mind; they’re just not so interesting a set. π being irrational gives us a never-ending variety of digits. It’s almost certainly normal, too. Any finite string of digits most likely appears infinitely often in this string.

We won’t ever know enough digits of π to depict all of them. But we can depict the digits we know, and many different ways. Here’s a 2015 Washington Post article with several pictures representing the digits, including some neat “random walk” ones. In those the digits are used to represent directions and distances for a thing to move, and it represents the number as this curious wispy structure. There’s amazing pictures to be made of this.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 15th is built more around the pie pun. I was relieved to see this. The kind of nerd jokes routinely made in Working Daze made me think it was bizarre the comic strip didn’t do a Pi Day joke. They were saving the setup.

And last, a comic strip that I don’t think was trying to set up a Pi Day joke. But Bill Schorr’s The Grizzwells for the 13th is a routine story problem joke. But that the setup mentions pies? If this ran on the 14th I would feel confident Schorr was going for a Pi Day comic. But it didn’t, so I don’t know if Schorr was going for that or not.

And those are the surprisingly few Pi Day 2019 comic strips. Later this week I should post, at this link, other recent mathematically-themed comic strips. Thanks for reading.

## Author: Joseph Nebus

I was born 198 years to the day after Johnny Appleseed. The differences between us do not end there. He/him.

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