Reading the Comics, January 25, 2020: Comic Strip Master Command Is Making This Hard For Me Edition

Or they’re making it easy for me. But for another week all the comic strips mentioning mathematics have done so in casual ways. Ones that I don’t feel I can write a substantial paragraph about. And so, ones that I don’t feel I can fairly use the images of here. Here’s strips that at least said “math” somewhere in them:

Mark Pett’s Mr Lowe rerun for the 18th had the hapless teacher giving out a quiz about fractions.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 19th plays on the conflation of “zero” and “nothing”. The concepts are related, and we wouldn’t have a zero if we weren’t trying to worth with the concept of nothing. But there is a difference that’s quite hard to talk about without confusing matters.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 19th has a student accused of cheating on a pre-algebra test.

Liniers’s Macanudo for the 21st has a kid struggling with mathematics while the imaginary friend goes off and plays.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate: First Class for the 21st has Nate struggling with mathematics. The strip is a reprint of the Big Nate from the 23rd of January, 1995.

Greg Curfman’s Meg for the 21st has Meg doing arithmetic homework.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 23rd is a wordplay joke, with a flash card that has an addition problem on it.

One of Gary Larson’s The Far Side reprints for the 24th has a man demanding the answer to one question: the square root of an arbitrary number. It’s a little over 70, and that’s as far as anyone could reasonably expect to answer off the top of their head.

James Beutel’s Banana Triangle for the 24th quotes The Wizard Of Oz’s famous garbled version of the Pythagorean Theorem.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 25th presents a sinister reading of the fad of “prove you’re human” puzzles that demanded arithmetic expressions be done. All computer programs, including, like, Facebook group messages are arithmetic operations ultimately. The steps could be translated into simple expressions like this and be done by humans. It just takes work which, I suppose, could also be translated into other expressions.

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And with that large pile of mentions I finish off the mathematical comic strips for the day. Also for the month: next Sunday gets us already into February. Sometime then I should post at this link a fresh Reading the Comics essay. Thank you for reading this one.