There were several more comic strips last week worth my attention. One of them, though, offered a lot for me to write about, packed into one panel featuring what comic strip fans call the Wall O’ Text.
Bea R’s In Security for the 9th is part of a storyline about defeating an evil “home assistant”. The choice of weapon is Michaela’s barrage of questions, too fast and too varied to answer. There are some mathematical questions tossed in the mix. The obvious one is “zero divided by two equals zero, but why’z two divided by zero called crazy town?” Like with most “why” mathematics questions there are a range of answers.
The obvious one, I suppose, is to appeal to intuition. Think of dividing one number by another by representing the numbers with things. Start with a pile of the first number of things. Try putting them into the second number of bins. How many times can you do this? And then you can pretty well see that you can fill two bins with zero things zero times. But you can fill zero bins with two things — well, what is filling zero bins supposed to mean? And that warns us that dividing by zero is at least suspicious.
That’s probably enough to convince a three-year-old, and probably most sensible people. If we start getting open-mined about what it means to fill no containers, we might say, well, why not have two things fill the zero containers zero times over, or once over, or whatever convenient answer would work? And here we can appeal to mathematical logic. Start with some ideas that seem straightforward. Like, that division is the inverse of multiplication. That addition and multiplication work like you’d guess from the way integers work. That distribution works. Then you can quickly enough show that if you allow division by zero, this implies that every number equals every other number. Since it would be inconvenient for, say, “six” to also equal “minus 113,847,506 and three-quarters” we say division by zero is the problem.
This is compelling until you ask what’s so great about addition and multiplication as we know them. And here’s a potentially fruitful line of attack. Coming up with alternate ideas for what it means to add or to multiply are fine. We can do this easily with modular arithmetic, that thing where we say, like, 5 + 1 equals 0 all over again, and 5 + 2 is 1 and 5 + 3 is 2. This can create a ring, and it can offer us wild ideas like “3 times 2 equals 0”. This doesn’t get us to where dividing by zero means anything. But it hints that maybe there’s some exotic frontier of mathematics in which dividing by zero is good, or useful. I don’t know of one. But I know very little about topics like non-standard analysis (where mathematicians hypothesize non-negative numbers that are not zero, but are also smaller than any positive number) or structures like surreal numbers. There may be something lurking behind a Quanta Magazine essay I haven’t read even though they tweet about it four times a week. (My twitter account is, for some reason, not loading this week.)
Michaela’s questions include a couple other mathematically-connected topics. “If infinity is forever, isn’t that crazy, too?” Crazy is a loaded word and probably best avoided. But there are infinity large sets of things. There are processes that take infinitely many steps to complete. Please be kind to me in my declaration “are”. I spent five hundred words on “two divided by zero”. I can’t get into that it means for a mathematical thing to “exist”. I don’t know. In any event. Infinities are hard and we rely on them. They defy our intuition. Mathematicians over the 19th and 20th centuries worked out fairly good tools for handling these. They rely on several strategies. Most of these amount to: we can prove that the difference between “infinitely many steps” and “very many steps” can be made smaller than any error tolerance we like. And we can say what “very many steps” implies for a thing. Therefore we can say that “infinitely many steps” gives us some specific result. A similar process holds for “infinitely many things” instead of “infinitely many steps”. This does not involve actually dealing with infinity, not directly. It involves dealing with large numbers, which work like small numbers but longer. This has worked quite well. There’s surely some field of mathematics about to break down that happy condition.
And there’s one more mathematical bit. Why is a ball round? This comes around to definitions. Suppose a ball is all the points within a particular radius of a center. What shape that is depends on what you mean by “distance”. The common definition of distance, the “Euclidean norm”, we get from our physical intuition. It implies this shape should be round. But there are other measures of distance, useful for other roles. They can imply “balls” that we’d say were octahedrons, or cubes, or rounded versions of these shapes. We can pick our distance to fit what we want to do, and shapes follow.
I suspect but do not know that it works the other way, that if we want a “ball” to be round, it implies we’re using a distance that’s the Euclidean measure. I defer to people better at normed spaces than I am.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 10th is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. It’s also a refreshing break from talking so much about In Security. Wavehead is doing the traditional kid-protesting-the-chalkboard-problem. This time with an electronic chalkboard, an innovation that I’ve heard about but never used myself.
Bob Scott’s Bear With Me for the 10th is the Pi Day joke for the week.
And that last one seemed substantial enough to highlight. There were even slighter strips. Among them: Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 4th features latitude and longitude, the parts of spherical geometry most of us understand. At least feel we understand. Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon for the 8th mentions mathematics as the homework parents most dread helping with. Larry Wright’s Motley rerun for the 10th does a joke about a kid being bad at geography and at mathematics.
And that’s this past week’s mathematics comics. Reading the Comics essays should all be gathered at this link. Thanks for reading this far.
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