Besides kids doing homework there were a good ten or so comic strips with enough mathematical content for me to discuss. So let me split that over a couple of days; I don’t have the time to do them all in one big essay.
Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 2nd is declared to be a Venn Diagram joke. As longtime readers of these columns know, it’s actually an Euler Diagram: a Venn Diagram requires some area of overlap between all combinations of the various sets. Two circles that never touch, or as these two do touch at a point, don’t count. They do qualify as Euler Diagrams, which have looser construction requirements. But everything’s named for Euler, so that’s a less clear identifier.
John Kovaleski’s Daddy Daze for the 2nd talks about probability. Particularly about the probability of guessing someone’s birthday. This is going to be about one chance in 365, or 366 in leap years. Birthdays are not perfectly uniformly distributed through the year. The 13th is less likely than other days in the month for someone to be born; this surely reflects a reluctance to induce birth on an unlucky day. Births are marginally more likely in September than in other months of the year; this surely reflects something having people in a merry-making mood in December. These are tiny effects, though, and to guess any day has about one chance in 365 of being someone’s birthday will be close enough.
If the child does this long enough there’s almost sure to be a match of person and birthday. It’s not guaranteed in the first 365 cards given out, or even the first 730, or more. But, if the birthdays of passers-by are independent — one pedestrian’s birthday has nothing to do with the next’s — then, overall, about one-365th of all cards will go to someone whose birthday it is. (This also supposes that we won’t see things like the person picked saying that while it’s not their birthday, it is their friend’s, here.) This, the Law of Large Numbers, one of the cornerstones of probability, guarantees us.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 2nd is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. And it’s a Venn Diagram joke, at least if the two circles are “really” there. Diplopia is what most of us would call double vision, seeing multiple offset copies of a thing. So the Venn diagram might be an optical illusion on the part of the businessman and the reader.
Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s Chuckle Brothers for the 3rd is not quite the anthropomorphic numerals joke of the week. At least, it’s built on manifesting numerals and doing things with them.
Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 3rd is an anthropomorphic mathematical symbols joke. I suppose it’s algebraic symbols. We usually get to see the ‘x’ and ‘y’ axes in (high school) algebra, used to differentiate two orthogonal axes. The axes can be named anything. If ‘x’ and ‘y’ won’t do, we might move to using 
Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals for the 3rd is a repeat, of course. Turner died several years ago and no one continued the strip. But it is also a repeat that I have discussed in these essays before, which likely makes this a good reason to drop Wee Pals from my regular reading here. There are 42 distinct ways to add (positive) whole numbers up to make ten, when you remember that you can add three or four or even six numbers together to do it. The study of how many different ways to make the same sum is a problem of partitioning. This might not seem very interesting, but if you try to guess how many ways there are to add up to 9 or 11 or 15, you’ll notice it’s a harder problem than it appears.
And for all that, there’s still some more comic strips to review. I will probably slot those in to Sunday, and start taking care of this current week’s comic strips on … probably Tuesday. Please check in at this link Sunday, and Tuesday, and we’ll see what I do.
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