Reading the Comics, May 7, 2020: Getting to Golf Edition

Last week saw a modest number of mathematically-themed comic strips. Then it threw in a bunch of them all on Thursday. I’m splitting the week partway through that, since it gives me some theme to this collection.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 3rd of May is a dictionary joke, with Brewster naming each kind of chart and making a quick joke about it. The comic may help people who’ve had trouble remembering the names of different kinds of graphs. I doubt people are likely to confuse a pie chart with a bar chart, admittedly. But I could imagine thinking a ‘line graph’ is what we call a bar chart, especially if the bars are laid out horizontally as in the second panel here.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 3rd of May, 2020. It’s been surprisingly long since I last reviewed this strip here. Essays featuring Brewster Rockit are at this link.

The point of all these graphs is to understand data geometrically. We have fair intuitions about relatives lengths and areas. Bar charts represent relative magnitudes in lengths. Pie charts and bubble charts represent magnitudes in area. We have okay skills in noticing structures in complex shapes. Line graphs and scatter plots use that skill. So these pictures can help us understand some abstraction or something we can’t sense using a sense we do have. It’s not necessarily great; note that I said our intuitions were ‘fair’ and ‘okay’. But we hope to use reason helped by intuition to better understand what we are doing.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 3rd is a resisting-the-story-problem joke. It’s built not just on wondering the point of story problems at all, but of these story problems during the pandemic. (Which Mallett on the 27th of April, would be taking “some liberties” with the real world. It’s a respectable decision.)

And, yes, in the greater scheme of things, any homework or classwork problem is trivial. It’s meant to teach how to calculate things we would like to know. The framing of the story is meant to give us a reason to want to know a thing. But they are practice, and meant to be practice. One practices on something of no consequence, where errors in one’s technique can be corrected without breaking anything.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 3rd of May, 2020. Reading the Comics essays with some mention of something in Frazz are gathered at this link.

It happens a round of story problems broke out among my family. My sister’s house has some very large trees. There turns out to be a poorly-organized process for estimating the age of these trees from their circumference. This past week saw a lot of chatter and disagreement about what the ages of these trees might be.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 4th riffs on the difference between rectangles and trapezoids. It’s also a repeat, featured here just five years ago. Amazing how time slips on like that.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 4th is another counting-sheep joke. It features one of those shorthands for large numbers which often makes them more manageable.

Michael Fry’s Committed rerun for the 7th finally gets us to golf. The Lazy Parent tries to pass off watching golf as educational, with working out the distance to the pin as a story problem. Structurally this is just fine, though: a golfer would be interested to know how far the ball has yet to go. All the information needed is given. It’s the question of whether anyone but syndicated cartoonists cares about golf that’s a mystery.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 7th is another golf and mathematics joke. Jason has taken the homonym of ‘fore’ for ‘four’, and then represented ‘four’ in a needlessly complicated way. Amend does understand how nerd minds work. The strip originally ran the 21st of May, 1998.

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That’s enough comics for me for today. I should have the rest of last week’s in a post at this link soon. Thank you.

Reading the Comics, September 21, 2019: Prime Numbers and the Rest

This is almost all a post about some comics that don’t need more than a mention. You know, strips that just have someone in class not buying the word problem. These are the rest of last week’s.

Before I get there, though, I want to share something. I ran across an essay by Chris K Caldwell and Yeng Xiong: What Is The Smallest Prime? The topic is about 1, and whether that should be a prime number. Everyone who knows a little about mathematics knows that 1 is generally not considered a prime number. But we’re also a bit stumped to figure out why, since the idea of “a prime number is divisible by 1 and itself” seems to fit this, even if the fit is weird. And we have an explanation for this: 1 used to be thought of as prime, but it made various theorems more clumsy to present. So it was either cut 1 out of the definition or add the equivalent work to everything, and mathematicians went for the solution that was less work. I know that I’ve shared this story around here. (I’m surprised to find I didn’t share it in my Summer 2017 A-to-Z essay about prime numbers.)

The truth is more complicated than that. The truth of anything is always more complicated than its history. Even an excellent history’s. It’s not that the short story has things wrong, precisely. But that that matters are more complicated than that. The history includes things we forget were ever problems, like, the question of whether 1 should be a number. And that the question of whether mathematicians “used to” consider 1 a number is built on the supposition that mathematicians were a lot more uniform in their thinking than they were. Even to the individual: people were inconsistent in what they themselves wrote, because most mathematicians turn out to be people.

It’s an eight-page paper, and not at all technical, so if you’re just interested in the history of whether 1 is a prime number, this is quite readable. It also points out a word ready for resurrection that we could use to mean “1 and the prime numbers”: the incomposites.

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So that’s some good reading. Now to the comic strips that you can glance at and agree are comic strips which say “math” somewhere in there. (They’d say “maths” if I read more British comic strips.)

Bob Scott’s Bear With Me for the 16th has Bear trying to help Molly get out of algebra.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 17th mentions entropy, which is so central to understanding statistical mechanics and information theory. It’s in the popular understanding of entropy, that of it being a thing which makes stuff get worse. But that’s of mathematical importance too.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 18th is about Maria having trouble with a mathematics exam. By the 20th, though, she’s doing better, and she has reasons.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 20th is set during mathematics class.

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This wraps up last week’s comic strips. I hope to have my next Reading the Comics post on Sunday. And then tomorrow I get to ‘H’ in the Fall 2019 A to Z essays. Thank you for reading.

Reading the Comics, December 15, 2018: Early Holiday Edition

So then this happened: Comic Strip Master Command didn’t have much they wanted me to write about this week. I made out three strips as being relevant enough to discuss at all. And even they don’t have topics that I felt I could really dig into. Coincidence, surely, although I like to think they were trying to help me get ahead of deadline on my A To Z essays for this last week of the run. It’s a noble thought, but doomed. I haven’t been more than one essay ahead of deadline the last three months. I know in past years I’ve gotten three or even four essays ahead of time and I don’t know why it hasn’t worked this time. I am going ahead and blaming that this these essays have been way longer than previous years’. So anyway, I thank Comic Strip Master Command for trying to make my Monday and my Thursday this week be less packed. It won’t help.

Darrin Bell and Theron Heir’s Rudy Park for the 10th uses mathematics as shorthand for a deep, thought-out theory of something. In this case, Randy’s theory of how to interest women. (He has rather a large number of romantic events around him.) It’s easy to suppose that people can be modeled mathematically. Even a crude model, one supposing that people have things they like and dislike, can give us good interesting results. This gets into psychology and sociology though. And probably requires computer modeling to get slightly useful results.

Darrin Bell and Theron Heir’s Rudy Park for the 10th of December, 2018. This strip is a rerun. It originally ran the 11th of January, 2010. Essays mentioning topics raised by Rudy Park are at this link.

Randy’s blackboard has a good number of legitimate equations on it. They’re maybe not so useful to his problem of modeling people, though. The lower left corner, for example, are three of Maxwell’s Equations, describing electromagnetism. I’m not sure about all of these, in part because I think some might be transcribed incorrectly. The second equation in the upper left, for example, looks like it’s getting at the curl of a conserved force field being zero, but it’s idiosyncratic to write that with a ‘d’ to start with. The symbols all over the right with both subscripts and superscripts look to me like tensor work. This turns up in electromagnetism, certainly. Tensors turn up anytime something, such as electrical conductivity, is different in different directions. But I’ve never worked deeply in those fields so all I can confidently say is that they look like they parse.

Lincoln Pierce’s Big Nate for the 14th of December, 2018. Other essays mentioning topics raised by Big Nate, both the current run — like this — and vintage 1990 are at this link.

Lincoln Pierce’s Big Nate for the 14th is part of a bit where Nate’s trying to write a gruesome detective mystery for kids. I’m not sure that’s a ridiculous idea, at least if the gore could be done at a level that wouldn’t be too visceral. Anyway, Nate has here got the idea of merging some educational value into the whole affair. It’s not presented as a story problem, just as characters explaining stuff to one another. There probably would be some room for an actual problem where Barky and Winky wanted to know something and had to work out how to find it from what they knew, though.

Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures for the 14th of December, 2018. All the essays where I’ve discussed Gentle Creatures are at this link although I suspect it’s mostly the same three comics discussed over and over.

Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures for the 14th uses a story problem to stand in for science fictional calculations. The strip’s in reruns and I’ve included it here at least four times, I discover, so that’s probably enough for the comic until it gets out of reruns.

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And since it was a low-volume week, let me mention strips I didn’t decide fit. Ray Kassinger asked about Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 12th. Might it be a play on Schrödinger’s Cat, the famous thought-experiment about how to understand the mathematics of quantum mechanics? It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely just that cats like sitting in boxes. Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 13th looks like it should be an anthropomorphic numerals joke. But it’s playing on the idiom about three being a crowd, and the whole of the mathematical content is that three is a number. John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 15th mentions mathematics. Particularly, Maria wishing they weren’t studying it. It’s a cameo appearance; it could be any subject whose value a student doesn’t see. That’s all I can make of it.

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This and my other Reading the Comics posts should all be available at this link. And please check back in Tuesday to see whether I make deadline for the letter ‘Y’ in my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z glossary.

Reading the Comics, January 27, 2018: Working Through The Week Edition

And today I bring the last couple mathematically-themed comic strips sent my way last week. GoComics has had my comics page working intermittently this week. And I was able to get a response from them, by e-mailing their international sales office, the only non-form contact I could find. Anyway, this flood of comics does take up the publishing spot I’d figured for figuring how I messed up Wronski’s formula. But that’s all right, as I wanted to spend more time thinking about that. Here’s hoping spending more time thinking works out for me.

Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 24th was the big anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. And it’s even dubbed the numbers game.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City from the 24th got into a storyline about Heart needing a mathematics tutor. It’s a rerun sequence, although if you remember a particular comic storyline from 2009 you’re doing pretty well. Nothing significantly mathematical has turned up in the story so far, past the mention of fractions as things that exist and torment students. But the stories are usually pretty good for this sort of strip.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morganthaler’s WuMo for the 24th includes a story problems freak out. I’m not sure what’s particularly implausible about buying nine apples. I’d agree a person is probably more likely to buy an even number of things, since we seem to like numbers like “ten” and “eight” so well, but it’s hardly ridiculous.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 25th is an arithmetic class on the Snowman Planet. So there’s some finger-counting involved.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 28th is a reminder that most of my days are spent seeing how Zach Weinersmith wants my attention. It also includes what I suppose is a legitimate attempt to offer a definition for what all mathematics is. It’s hard to come up with something that does cover all the stuff mathematicians do. Bear in mind, this includes counting, calculating how far the Sun is based on the appearance of a lunar eclipse, removing static from a recording, and telling how many queens it’s possible to place eight queens on a chess board that’s wrapped around a torus without any being able to capture another, among other problems. My instinct is to dismiss the proposed “anything you can think deeply about that has no reference to the real world”. That seems over-broad, and to cover a lot of areas that are really philosophy’s beat. And I think there’s something unseemly in mathematicians gloating about their work having no “practical” use. I grant I come from an applied school, and I came to there through an interest in physics. But to build up “inapplicability to the real word” as if it were some ideal, as opposed to just how something has turned out to be right now, strikes me as silly. Applicability is so dependent on context, on culture, and accidents of fate that there’s no way it can be important to characterizing mathematics. And it would imply that once we found a use for something it would stop being mathematically interesting. I don’t see evidence of that in mathematical history.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morganthaler’s WuMo pops back in on the 27th with an appearance of sudoku, presenting the logic puzzle as one of the many things beyond the future Disgraced Former President’s abilities.