There were a bunch of comic strips mentioning some kind of mathematical theme last week. I need to clear some out. So I’ll start with some of the marginal mentions. Many of these involve having to deal with exams or quizzes.
Jonathan Mahood’s Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog from the 3rd started a sequence about the robot dog helping Skip with his homework. This would include flash cards, which weren’t helping, in preparation for a test. Bleeker would go to slightly ridiculous ends, since, after all, you never know when something will click.
There are different ways to find square roots. (I can guarantee that Skip wasn’t expected to use this one.) The term ‘root’ derives from an idea that the root of a number is the thing that generates it: 3 is a square root of 9 because multiplying 3’s together gives you 9. ‘Square’ is I have always only assumed because multiplying a number by itself will give you the area of a square with sides of length that number. This is such an obvious word origin, though, that I am reflexively suspicious. Word histories are usually subtle and capricious things.
Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes for the 3rd began the reprint of a storyling based on a story-problem quiz. Calvin fantasizes solving it in a wonderful spoof of hardboiled detective stories. There is a moment of Tracer Bullet going over exactly what information he has, which is a good first step for any mathematics problem. I assume it’s also helpful for solving real mysteries.
The strip for the 8th closing the storyline has a nice example of using “billion” as a number so big as to be magical, capable of anything. Big numbers can do strange and contrary-to-intuition things. But they can be reasoned out.
Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 4th sees the title character figuring she could sell her “personal smartness”. Her best friend Trout wonders if that’s tutoring math or something. (Incidentally, Agnes is one of the small handful of strips to capture what made Calvin and Hobbes great; I recommend giving it a try.)
Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics reprint for the 6th mentions that Peter has a mathematics test scheduled, and shows part of his preparation.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Begins for the 5th sees Charlie Brown working problems on the board. He’s stuck for what to do until he recasts the problem as scoring in football and golf. We may giggle at this, but I support his method. It’s convinced him the questions are worth solving, the most important thing to doing them at all. And it’s gotten him to the correct answers. Casting these questions as sports problems is the building of falsework: it helps one do the task, and then is taken away (or hidden) from the final product. Everyone who does mathematics builds some falsework like this. If we do a particular problem, or kind of problem, often enough we get comfortable enough with the main work that we don’t need the falsework anymore. So it is likely to be for Charlie Brown.
On the 8th is another strip of Charlie Brown doing arithmetic in class. Here he just makes a mistake from having counted in a funny way all morning. This, too, happens to us all.
I will have more Reading the Comics posts at this link, hopefully this week. Incidentally other essays mentioning Agnes are at this link, and essays mentioning FoxTrot, reruns or the new-run Sundays, are here. Thanks for reading.
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