As I referenced on Sunday while there were a good number of comic strips mentioning mathematics last week, there weren’t many touching deeply enough for me to make real essays about them. But you may enjoy seeing the strips anyway. So here’s the first half of this roster.
Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 15th is a spot of wordplay about “the odds”. There’s a similar wordplay used in Jeffrey Caulfield and Brian Ponshock’s Yaffle for the 16th, and it’s a repeat. I saw and even commented on it a bit over a year ago.
Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate:First Class for the 16th reprints a strip from 1994 with Nate not doing his mathematics homework.
Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 16th has Toby discovering a personal need for arithmetic. Accounting doesn’t get much praise from us mathematics majors, but it’s deserving of attention.
Carol Lay’s Lay Lines for the 16th feels to me like a narrative version of the liar’s paradox. On studying the story I’m not sure I can justify that. But it feels like it to me.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 17th has young Sarah Morgan not wanting to do the mathematics of counting days to Christmas. Or working out the number of days to Christmas. (And for those who don’t know, I regularly do recaps of the plot in Rex Morgan, M.D. on my other blog. I plan to get to this strip the first week in January, but the older essay will catch you up to October and it’s not like “family at Christmas” needs a lot of backstory even in the story strips.)
Bud Blake’s vintage Tiger for the 19th (a rerun from February 1967, looks like) has an improbably long string of coin tosses all go the same way.
Marguerite Dabaie and Tom Hart’s Ali’s House for the 19th builds on a character worrying about the dimensions of space he occupies. I don’t know where he’s going with that, though.
Thanks for reading that much. There’ll be a second half to this at this link later in the week, trusting that all goes well.
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