Although I’m out of the A to Z sequence, I like the habit of posting just the comic strips that name-drop mathematics for the Sunday post. It frees up so much of my Saturday, at the cost of committing my Sunday. So here’s last week’s casual mentions of some mathematics topic.
Wayno and Piraro’s Bizarro for the 3rd of December has a kid doing badly in arithmetic and blaming forces beyond their control.
Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 5th has the CEO of Fastrack, Inc, disappointed in what analytics can do. Analytics, here, is the search for statistical correlations, traits that are easy to spot and that indicate greater risks or opportunities. The desire to find these is great and natural. Real data is, though, tantalizingly not quite good enough to answer most interesting questions.
Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 5th repeats A Voice From Another Dimension, Bolling’s riff on the Flatland premise.
Tauhid Bondia’s Crabgrass for the 6th uses a background panel of calculus work as part of illustrating deep thinking about something, in this case, how to fairly divide chocolate. One of calculus’s traditional strengths is calculating the volumes of interesting figures.
Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 6th reprints the Christmas Tree guide with a Cubist Fir that “no longer inhabits Euclidean space”.
Joe Martin’s Mr Boffo for the 6th is a cute joke on one of the uses of numbers, that of being a convenient and inexhaustible index. The strip ran on Friday and I don’t know how to link to the archives in a stable way. This is why I’ve put the comic up here.
And that’s enough comics for just now. Later this week I’ll get to the comics that inspire me to write more.
nebusresearch 