I apologize for missing Sunday. I wasn’t able to make the time to write about last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. But I’m back in the swing of things. Here are some of the comic strips that got my attention.
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Little Oop for the 26th has something neat in the background. Oop and Garg walk past a vendor showing off New Numbers. This is, among other things, a cute callback to one of the first of Lemon and Sayers’s Little Oop strips.. (And has nothing to do with the daily storyline featuring the adult Alley Oop.) And it is a funny idea to think of “new numbers”. I imagine most of us trust that numbers are just … existing, somewhere, as concepts independent of our knowing them. We may not be too sure about the Platonic Forms. But, like, “eight” seems like something that could plausibly exist independently of our understanding of it.
Still, we do keep discovering things we didn’t know were numbers before. The earliest number notations, in the western tradition, for example, used letters to represent numbers. This did well for counting numbers, up to a large enough total. But it required idiosyncratic treatment if you wanted to handle large numbers. Hindu-Arabic numerals make it easy to represent whole numbers as large as you like. But that’s at the cost of adding ten (well, I guess eight) symbols that have nothing to do with the concept represented. Not that, like, ‘J’ looks like the letter J either. (There is a folk etymology that the Arabic numerals correspond to the number of angles made if you write them out in a particular way. Or less implausibly, the number of strokes needed for the symbol. This is ingenious and maybe possibly has helped one person somewhere, ever, learn the symbols. But it requires writing, like, ‘7’ in a way nobody has ever done, and it’s ahistorical nonsense. See section 96, on page 64 of the book and 84 of the web presentation, in Florian Cajori’s History of Mathematical Notations.)
Still, in time we discovered, for example, that there were irrational numbers and those were useful to have. Negative numbers, and those are useful to have. That there are complex-valued numbers, and those are useful to have. That there are quaternions, and … I guess we can use them. And that we can set up systems that resemble arithmetic, and work a bit like numbers. Those are often quite useful. I expect Lemon and Sayers were having fun with the idea of new numbers. They are a thing that, effectively, happens.
Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate: First Class for the 26th has Nate badgering Francis for mathematics homework answers. Could be any subject, but arithmetic will let Peirce fit in a couple answers in one panel.
Art Sansom and Chip Sansom’s The Born Loser for the 26th is another strip on the theme of people winning the lottery and being hit by lightning. And, as I’ve mentioned, there is at least one person known to have won a lottery and survived a lightning strike.
David Malki’s Wondermark for the 27th describes engineering as “like math, but louder”, which is a pretty good line. And it uses backgrounds of long calculations to make the point of deep thought going on. I don’t recognize just what calculations are being done there, but they do look naggingly familiar. And, you know, that’s still a pretty lucky day.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 27th is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. It depicts Wavehead having trouble figuring where to put the decimal point in the multiplication of two decimal numbers. Relatable issue. There are rules you can follow for where to put the decimal in this sort of operation. But the convention of dropping terminal zeroes after the decimal point can make that hazardous. It’s something that needs practice, or better: though. In this case, what catches my eye is that 2.95 times 3.2 has to be some number close to 3 times 3. So 9.440 is the plausible answer.
Mike Twohy’s That’s Life for the 27th presents a couple of plausible enough word problems, framed as Sports Math. It’s funny because of the idea that the workers who create events worth billions of dollars a year should be paid correspondingly.
This isn’t all for the week from me. I hope to have another Reading the Comics installment at this link, soon. Thanks for reading.
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