## Reading the Comics, August 16, 2018: Recursive Edition

This edition of Reading the Comics can be found at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th is a fractals joke. Benoit Mandelbrot became the centerpiece of the big fractals boom in pop mathematics in the 80s and 90s. This was thanks to a fascinating property of complex-valued numbers that he discovered and publicized. The Mandelbrot set is a collection of complex-valued numbers. It’s a border, properly, between two kinds of complex-valued numbers. This boundary has this fascinating shape that looks a bit like a couple kidney beans surrounded by lightning. That’s neat enough.

What’s amazing, and makes this joke anything, is what happens if you look closely at this boundary. Anywhere on it. In the bean shapes or in the lightning bolts. You find little replicas of the original shape. Not precisely the original shape. No two of these replicas are precisely identical (except for the “complex conjugate”, that is, something near the number $-1 + 1 \imath$ has a mirror image near $-1 - 1 \imath$). None of these look precisely like the original shape. But they look extremely close to one another. They’re smaller, yes, and rotated relative to the original, and to other copies. But go anywhere on this boundary and there it is: the original shape, including miniature imperfect copies, all over again.

The Mandelbrot Set itself — well, there are a bunch of ways to think of it. One is in terms of something called the Julia Set, named for Gaston Julia. In 1918 he published a massive paper about the iteration of rational functions. That is, start with some domain and a function rule; what’s the range? Now if we used that range as the domain again, and used the same rule for the function, what’s the range of that range? If we use the range-of-that-range as the domain for the same function rule, what’s the range-of-the-range-of-the-range? The particular function here has one free parameter, a single complex-valued number. Depending on what it is, the range-of-the-range-of-the-range-etc becomes a set that’s either one big blob or a bunch of disconnected blobs. The Mandelbrot Set is the locus of parameters separating the one-big-blob from the many-disconnected-blob outcomes.

By the way, yes, Julia published this in 1918. The work was amazing. It was also forgotten. You can study this stuff analytically, but it’s hard. To visualize it you need to do incredible loads of computation. So this is why so much work lay fallow until the 1970s, when Mandelbrot could let computers do incredible loads of computation, and even draw some basic pictures.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 14th is another instance of the monkeys-at-typewriters joke. I’ve written about this and the history of the monkeys-at-typewriters bit recently enough to feel comfortable pointing people there. It’s interesting that monkeys should have a connotation of reliably random typewriting, while cats would be reliably not doing something. But that’s a cultural image that’s a little too far from being mathematics for me to spend 800 words discussing.

Thom Bleumel’s Birdbrains for the 15th is a calendars joke. Numbers come into play since, well, it seems odd to try tracking large numbers of dates without some sense of arithmetic. Also, likely, without some sense of geometry. Calendars are much used to forecast coming events, such as New and Full Moons or the seasons. That takes basic understanding of how to locate things in the sky to do at all. It takes sophisticated understanding of how to locate things in the sky to do well.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 16th is the first anthropomorphic-numerals joke around here in like three days. Certainly, the scandalous thing is supposed to be these numbers multiplying out in public where anyone might see them. I wonder if any part of the scandal should be that multiplication like this has to include three partners: the 4, the 7, and the x. In algebra we get used to a convention in which we do without the ‘x’. Just placing one term next to another carries an implicit multiplication: ‘4a’ for ‘4 times a’. But that convention fails disastrously with numerals; what should we make of ’47’? We might write 4(7), or maybe (4)(7), to be clear. Or we might put a little centered dot between the two, $4 \cdot 7$. The ‘x’ by that point is reserved for “some variable whose value isn’t specified”. And it would be weird to write ‘4 times x times 7’. It wouldn’t be wrong; it’d just look weird. It would suggest you were trying to emphasize a point. I’ve probably done it in one of my long derivation-happy posts.

Other essays about comic strips are at this link. When I’ve talked about Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal I’ve tried to make sure it turns up at this link. Essays in which I’ve discussed Savage Chickens should be at this link. The times I’ve discussed Birdbrains should be at this link. And other essays describing The Argyle Sweater are at this link.

## Reading the Comics, January 13, 2018: Barney Google Is Messing With My Head For Some Reason Edition

I do not know what’s possessed John Rose, cartoonist for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith — possibly the oldest syndicated comic strip not in perpetual reruns — to decide he needs to mess with my head. So far as I’m aware we haven’t ever even had any interactions. While I’ll own up to snarking about the comic strip here and there, I mean, the guy draws Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. He won’t attract the snark community of, say, Marmaduke, but he knew the job was dangerous when he took it. There’s lots of people who’ve said worse things about the comic than I ever have. He can’t be messing with them all.

There’s no mathematical content to it, but here, continuing the curious thread of Elviney and Miss Prunelly looking the same, and Elviney turning out to have a twin sister, is the revelation that Elviney’s husband also has a twin.

This means something and I don’t know what.

To mathematics:

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets my attention again for the 10th. There is this famous quotation from Leopold Kronecker, one of the many 19th century German mathematicians who challenged, and set, our ideas of what mathematics is. In debates about what should count as a proof Kronecker said something translated in English to, “God created the integers, all else is the work of man”. He favored proofs that only used finite numbers, and only finitely many operations, and was skeptical of existence proofs. Those are ones that show something with desired properties must exist, without necessarily showing how to find it. Most mathematicians accept existence proofs. If you can show how to find that thing, that’s a constructive proof. Usually mathematicians like those better.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 11th uses a bunch of arithmetic and word problems to represent all of Dean’s homework. All looks like reasonable homework for my best guess about his age.

Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse for the 11th is a fun, simple joke with some complex stuff behind it. It’s riffing on the kind of atheist who wants moral values to come from something in the STEM fields. So here’s a mathematical basis for some moral principles. There are, yes, ethical theories that have, or at least imply having, mathematics behind them. Utilitarianism at least supposes that ethical behavior can be described as measurable and computable quantities. Nobody actually does that except maybe to make video games more exciting. But it’s left with the idea that one could, and hope that this would lead to guidance that doesn’t go horribly wrong.

Don Asmussen’s Bad Reporter for the 12th uses knowledge of arithmetic as a signifier of intelligence. Common enough joke style.

Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 13th starts Pi Day observances early, or maybe supposed the joke would be too out of season were it to come in March.

Greg Evans and Karen Evans’s Luann for the 13th uses mathematics to try building up the villainy of one of the strip’s designated villains. Ann Eiffel, there, uses a heap of arithmetic to make her lingerie sale sound better. This isn’t simply a riff on people not wanting to do arithmetic, although I understand people not wanding to work out what five percent of a purchase of over $200 is. There’s a good deal of weird psychology in getting people to buy things. Merely naming a number, for example, gets people to “anchor” their expectations to it. To speak of a free gift worth$75 makes any purchase below $75 seem more economical. To speak of a chance to win$1,000 prepares people to think they’ve got a thousand dollars coming in, and that they can safely spend under that. It’s amazing stuff to learn about, and it isn’t all built on people being too lazy to figure out what five percent off of \$220 would be.

T Lewis and Michael Fry’s Over the Hedge for the 13th uses &infty; along the way to making nonsense out of ice-skating judging. It’s a good way to make a hash of a rating system. Most anything done with infinitely large numbers or infinitely large sets challenges one’s intuition at least. This is part of what Leopold Kronecker was talking about.

## Reading the Comics, September 16, 2017: Wait, Are Elviney and Miss Prunelly The Same Character Week

It was an ordinary enough week when I realized I wasn’t sure about the name of the schoolmarm in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. So I looked it up on Comics Kingdom’s official cast page for John Rose’s comic strip. And then I realized something about the Smiths’ next-door neighbor Elviney and Jughaid’s teacher Miss Prunelly:

Are … are they the same character, just wearing different glasses? I’ve been reading this comic strip for like forty years and I’ve never noticed this before. I’ve also never heard any of you all joking about this, by the way, so I stand by my argument that if they’re prominent enough then, yes, glasses could be an adequate disguise for Superman. Anyway, I’m startled. (Are they sisters? Cousins? But wouldn’t that make mention on the cast page? There are missing pieces here.)

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic In A Minute feature for the 10th sneaks in here yet again with a magic trick based in arithmetic. Here, they use what’s got to be some Magic Square-based technology for a card trick. This probably could be put to use with other arrangements of numbers, but cards have the advantage of being stuff a magician is likely to have around and that are expected to do something weird.

Susan Camilleri Konair’s Six Chix for the 13th name-drops mathematics as the homework likely to be impossible doing. I think this is the first time Konair’s turned up in a Reading The Comics survey.

Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 13th is an Albert Einstein Needing Help panel. It’s got your blackboard full of symbols, not one of which is the famous E = mc2 equation. But given the setup it couldn’t feature that equation, not and be a correct joke.

John Rose’s Barney Google for the 14th does a little more work than necessary for its subtraction-explained-with-candy joke. I non-sarcastically appreciate Rose’s dodging the obvious joke in favor of a guy-is-stupid joke.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 14th is a kind of lying-with-statistics joke. That’s as much as it needs to be. Still, thought always should go into exactly how one presents data, especially visually. There are connotations to things. Just inverting an axis is dangerous stuff, though. The convention of matching an increase in number to moving up on the graph is so ingrained that it should be avoided only for enormous cause.

This joke also seems conceptually close, to me, to the jokes about the strangeness of how a “negative” medical test is so often the good news.

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 15th is not about solitaire. But “solving” a game by simulating many gameplays and drawing strategic advice from that is a classic numerical mathematics trick. Whether a game is fun once it’s been solved so is up to you. And often in actual play, for a game with many options at each step, it’s impossible without a computer to know the best possible move. You could use simulations like this to develop general guidelines, and a couple rules that often pan out.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 16th qualifies as the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for this week. I’m glad to have got one in.

## Reading the Comics, January 7, 2016: Just Before GoComics Breaks Everything Edition

Most of the comics I review here are printed on GoComics.com. Well, most of the comics I read online are from there. But even so I think they have more comic strips that mention mathematical themes. Anyway, they’re unleashing a complete web site redesign on Monday. I don’t know just what the final version will look like. I know that the beta versions included the incredibly useful, that is to say dumb, feature where if a particular comic you do read doesn’t have an update for the day — and many of them don’t, as they’re weekly or three-times-a-week or so — then it’ll show some other comic in its place. I mean, the idea of encouraging people to find new comics is a good one. To some extent that’s what I do here. But the beta made no distinction between “comic you don’t read because you never heard of Microcosm” and “comic you don’t read because glancing at it makes your eyes bleed”. And on an idiosyncratic note, I read a lot of comics. I don’t need to see Dude and Dude reruns in fourteen spots on my daily comics page, even if I didn’t mind it to start.

Anyway. I am hoping, desperately hoping, that with the new site all my old links to comics are going to keep working. If they don’t then I suppose I’m just ruined. We’ll see. My suggestion is if you’re at all curious about the comics you read them today (Sunday) just to be safe.

Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shots is a curious little strip I never knew of until GoComics picked it up a few years ago. Its format is compellingly simple: a little illustration alongside a wry, often despairing, caption. I love it, but I also understand why was the subject of endless queries to the Detroit Free Press (Or Whatever) about why was this thing taking up newspaper space. The strip rerun the 31st of December is a typical example of the strip and amuses me at least. And it uses arithmetic as the way to communicate reasoning, both good and bad. Brilliant’s joke does address something that logicians have to face, too. Whether an argument is logically valid depends entirely on its structure. If the form is correct the reasoning may be excellent. But to be sound an argument has to be correct and must also have its assumptions be true. We can separate whether an argument is right from whether it could ever possibly be right. If you don’t see the value in that, you have never participated in an online debate about where James T Kirk was born and whether Spock was the first Vulcan in Star Fleet.

Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 2nd of January, 2017, is a loaded-dice joke. Is this truly mathematics? Statistics, at least? Close enough for the start of the year, I suppose. Working out whether a die is loaded is one of the things any gambler would like to know, and that mathematicians might be called upon to identify or exploit. (I had a grandmother unshakably convinced that I would have some natural ability to beat the Atlantic City casinos if she could only sneak the underaged me in. I doubt I could do anything of value there besides see the stage magic show.)

Jack Pullan’s Boomerangs rerun for the 2nd is built on the one bit of statistical mechanics that everybody knows, that something or other about entropy always increasing. It’s not a quantum mechanics rule, but it’s a natural confusion. Quantum mechanics has the reputation as the source of all the most solid, irrefutable laws of the universe’s working. Statistical mechanics and thermodynamics have this musty odor of 19th-century steam engines, no matter how much there is to learn from there. Anyway, the collapse of systems into disorder is not an irrevocable thing. It takes only energy or luck to overcome disorderliness. And in many cases we can substitute time for luck.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 3rd is the anthropomorphic-geometry-figure joke that’s I’ve been waiting for. I had thought Hilburn did this all the time, although a quick review of Reading the Comics posts suggests he’s been more about anthropomorphic numerals the past year. This is why I log even the boring strips: you never know when I’ll need to check the last time Scott Hilburn used “acute” to mean “cute” in reference to triangles.

Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue uses some arithmetic as the visual cue for “any old kind of schoolwork, really”. Steve Breen’s name seems to have gone entirely from the comic strip. On Usenet group rec.arts.comics.strips Brian Henke found that Breen’s name hasn’t actually been on the comic strip since May, and D D Degg found a July 2014 interview indicating Thompson had mostly taken the strip over from originator Breen.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 5th is another name-drop that doesn’t have any real mathematics content. But come on, we’re talking Andertoons here. If I skipped it the world might end or something untoward like that.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 14th of November, 1977, doesn’t have any mathematical content really. Just a mention. But I need some kind of visual appeal for this essay and Shearer is usually good for that.

Corey Pandolph, Phil Frank, and Joe Troise’s The Elderberries rerun for the 7th is also a very marginal mention. But, what the heck, it’s got some of your standard wordplay about angles and it’ll get this week’s essay that much closer to 800 words.