Reading the Comics, March 17, 2020: Random Edition

I thought last week’s comic strips mentioning mathematics in detail were still subjects easy to describe in one or two paragraphs each. I wasn’t quite right. So here’s a half of a week, even if it is a day later than I had wanted to post.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 15th is a straggler Pi Day joke, built on the nerd couple Roy and Kathy letting the date slip their minds. This is a very slight Pi Day reference but I feel the need to include it for completeness’s sake. It reminds me of the sequence where one year Schroeder forgot Beethoven’s birthday, and was devastated.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 15th of March, 2020. Essays featuring Working Daze, which often turns up in Pi Day events, are at this link. And generally essays tied to Pi Day are at this link.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate for the 15th is a wordy bit of Nate refusing the story problem. Nate complains about a lack of motivation for the characters in it. But then what we need for a story problem isn’t the characters to do something so much as it is the student to want to solve the problem. That’s hard work. Everyone’s fascinated by some mathematical problems, but it’s hard to think of something that will compel everyone to wonder what the answer could be.

At one point Nate wonders what happens if Todd stops for gas. Here he’s just ignoring the premise of the question: Todd is given as travelling an average 55 mph until he reaches Saint Louis, and that’s that. So this question at least is answered. But he might need advice to see how it’s implied.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate for the 15th of March, 2020. Essays with something mentioned by either Big Nate or the 1990s-repeats Big Nate: First Class are gathered at this link.

So this problem is doable by long division: 1825 divided by 80, and 1192 divided by 55, and see what’s larger. Can we avoid dividing by 55 if we’re doing it by hand? I think so. Here’s what I see: 1825 divided by 80 is equal to 1600 divided by 80 plus 225 divided by 80. That first is 20; that second is … eh. It’s a little less than 240 divided by 80, which is 3. So Mandy will need a little under 23 hours.

Is 23 hours enough for Todd to get to Saint Louis? Well, 23 times 55 will be 23 times 50 plus 23 times 5. 23 times 50 is 22 times 50 plus 1 times 50. 22 times 50 is 11 times 100, or 1100. So 23 times 50 is 1150. And 23 times 5 has to be 150. That’s more than 1192. So Todd gets there first. I might want to figure just how much less than 23 hours Mandy needs, to be sure of my calculation, but this is how I do it without putting 55 into an ugly number like 1192.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy repeat for the 17th of March, 2020. The too-rare appearances of Cow and Boy Reruns in my essays are here.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy repeat for the 17th sees the Boy, Billy, trying to beat the lottery. He throws at it the terms chaos theory and nonlinear dynamical systems. They’re good and probably relevant systems. A “dynamical system” is what you’d guess from the name: a collection of things whose properties keep changing. They change because of other things in the collection. When “nonlinear” crops up in mathematics it means “oh but such a pain to deal with”. It has a more precise definition, but this is its meaning. More precisely: in a linear system, a change in the initial setup makes a proportional change in the outcome. If Todd drove to Saint Louis on a path two percent longer, he’d need two percent more time to get there. A nonlinear system doesn’t guarantee that; a two percent longer drive might take ten percent longer, or one-quarter the time, or some other weirdness. Nonlinear systems are really good for giving numbers that look random. There’ll be so many little factors that make non-negligible results that they can’t be predicted in any useful time. This is good for drawing number balls for a lottery.

Chaos theory turns up a lot in dynamical systems. Dynamical systems, even nonlinear ones, often have regions that behave in predictable patterns. We may not be able to say what tomorrow’s weather will be exactly, but we can say whether it’ll be hot or freezing. But dynamical systems can have regions where no prediction is possible. Not because they don’t follow predictable rules. But because any perturbation, however small, produces changes that overwhelm the forecast. This includes the difference between any possible real-world measurement and the real quantity.

Obvious question: how is there anything to study in chaos theory, then? Is it all just people looking at complicated systems and saying, yup, we’re done here? Usually the questions turn on problems such as how probable it is we’re in a chaotic region. Or what factors influence whether the system is chaotic, and how much of it is chaotic. Even if we can’t say what will happen, we can usually say something about when we can’t say what will happen, and why. Anyway if Billy does believe the lottery is chaotic, there’s not a lot he can be doing with predicting winning numbers from it. Cow’s skepticism is fair.

Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics for the 17th of March, 2020. Essays that mention something brought up in Dinosaur Comics are gathered at this link.

Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics for the 17th is one about people asked to summon random numbers. Utahraptor is absolutely right. People are terrible at calling out random numbers. We’re more likely to summon odd numbers than we should be. We shy away from generating strings of numbers. We’d feel weird offering, say, 1234, though that’s as good a four-digit number as 1753. And to offer 2222 would feel really weird. Part of this is that there’s not really such a thing as “a” random number; it’s sequences of numbers that are random. We just pick a number from a random sequence. And we’re terrible at producing random sequences. Here’s one study, challenging people to produce digits from 1 through 9. Are their sequences predictable? If the numbers were uniformly distributed from 1 through 9, then any prediction of the next digit in a sequence should have a one chance in nine of being right. It turns out human-generated sequences form patterns that could be forecast, on average, 27% of the time. Individual cases could get forecast 45% of the time.

There are some neat side results from that study too, particularly that they were able to pretty reliably tell the difference between two individuals by their “random” sequences. We may be bad at thinking up random numbers but the details of how we’re bad can be unique.

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And I’m not done yet. There’s some more comic strips from last week to discuss and I’ll have that post here soon. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, August 16, 2019: The Comments Drive Me Crazy Edition

Last week was another light week of work from Comic Strip Master Command. One could fairly argue that nothing is worth my attention. Except … one comic strip got onto the calendar. And that, my friends, is demanding I pay attention. Because the comic strip got multiple things wrong. And then the comments on GoComics got it more wrong. Got things wrong to the point that I could not be sure people weren’t trolling each other. I know how nerds work. They do this. It’s not pretty. So since I have the responsibility to correct strangers online I’ll focus a bit on that.

Robb Armstrong’s JumpStart for the 13th starts off all right. The early Roman calendar had ten months, December the tenth of them. This was a calendar that didn’t try to cover the whole year. It just started in spring and ran into early winter and that was it. This may seem baffling to us moderns, but it is, I promise you, the least confusing aspect of the Roman calendar. This may seem less strange if you think of the Roman calendar as like a sports team’s calendar, or a playhouse’s schedule of shows, or a timeline for a particular complicated event. There are just some fallow months that don’t need mention.

Robb Armstrong’s JumpStart for the 13th of August, 2019. Essays featuring JumpStart should appear at this link. I am startled to learn that this is a new tag, though. I hope the comic makes more appearances; it’s pleasantly weird in low-key ways. Well, I mean, those are cops driving an ice cream truck and that’s one of the more mundane things about the comic, you know?

Things go wrong with Rob’s claim that December will have five Saturdays, five Sundays, and five Mondays. December 2019 will have no such thing. It has four Saturdays. There are five Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays. From Crunchy’s response it sounds like Joe’s run across some Internet Dubious Science Folklore. You know, where you see a claim that (like) Saturn will be larger in the sky than anytime since the glaciers receded or something. And as you’d expect, it’s gotten a bit out of date. December 2018 had five Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. So did December 2012. And December 2007.

And as this shows, that’s not a rare thing. Any month with 31 days will have five of some three days in the week. August 2019, for example, has five Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. October 2019 will have five Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. This we can show by the pigeonhole principle. And there are seven months each with 31 days in every year.

It’s not every year that has some month with five Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays in it. 2024 will not, for example. But a lot of years do. I’m not sure why December gets singled out for attention here. From the setup about December having long ago been the tenth month, I guess it’s some attempt to link the fives of the weekend days to the ten of the month number. But we get this kind of December about every five or six years.

This 823 years stuff, now that’s just gibberish. The Gregorian calendar has its wonders and mysteries yes. None of them have anything to do with 823 years. Here, people in the comments got really bad at explaining what was going on.

So. There are fourteen different … let me call them year plans, available to the Gregorian calendar. January can start on a Sunday when it is a leap year. Or January can start on a Sunday when it is not a leap year. January can start on a Monday when it is a leap year. January can start on a Monday when it is not a leap year. And so on. So there are fourteen possible arrangements of the twelve months of the year, what days of the week the twentieth of January and the thirtieth of December can occur on. The incautious might think this means there’s a period of fourteen years in the calendar. This comes from misapplying the pigeonhole principle.

Here’s the trouble. January 2019 started on a Tuesday. This implies that January 2020 starts on a Wednesday. January 2025 also starts on a Wednesday. But January 2024 starts on a Monday. You start to see the pattern. If this is not a leap year, the next year starts one day of the week later than this one. If this is a leap year, the next year starts two days of the week later. This is all a slightly annoying pattern, but it means that, typically, it takes 28 years to get back where you started. January 2019 started on Tuesday; January 2020 on Wednesday, and January 2021 on Friday. the same will hold for January 2047 and 2048 and 2049. There are other successive years that will start on Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday before that.

Except.

The important difference between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars is century years. 1900. 2000. 2100. These are all leap years by the Julian calendar reckoning. Most of them are not, by the Gregorian. Only century years divisible by 400 are. 2000 was a leap year; 2400 will be. 1900 was not; 2100 will not be, by the Gregorian scheme.

These exceptions to the leap-year-every-four-years pattern mess things up. The 28-year-period does not work if it stretches across a non-leap-year century year. By the way, if you have a friend who’s a programmer who has to deal with calendars? That friend hates being a programmer who has to deal with calendars.

There is still a period. It’s just a longer period. Happily the Gregorian calendar has a period of 400 years. The whole sequence of year patterns from 2000 through 2019 will reappear, 2400 through 2419. 2800 through 2819. 3200 through 3219.

(Whether they were also the year patterns for 1600 through 1619 depends on where you are. Countries which adopted the Gregorian calendar promptly? Yes. Countries which held out against it, such as Turkey or the United Kingdom? No. Other places? Other, possibly quite complicated, stories. If you ask your computer for the 1619 calendar it may well look nothing like 2019’s, and that’s because it is showing the Julian rather than Gregorian calendar.)

Except.

This is all in reference to the days of the week. The date of Easter, and all of the movable holidays tied to Easter, is on a completely different cycle. Easter is set by … oh, dear. Well, it’s supposed to be a simple enough idea: the Sunday after the first spring full moon. It uses a notional moon that’s less difficult to predict than the real one. It’s still a bit of a mess. The date of Easter is periodic again, yes. But the period is crazy long. It would take 5,700,000 years to complete its cycle on the Gregorian calendar. It never will. Never try to predict Easter. It won’t go well. Don’t believe anything amazing you read about Easter online.

Michael Jantze’s The Norm (Classics) for the 15th of August, 2019. I had just written how I wanted to share this strip more. Essays about The Norm, both the current (“4.0”) run and older reruns (“Classics”), are at this link.

Michael Jantze’s The Norm (Classics) for the 15th is much less trouble. It uses some mathematics to represent things being easy and things being hard. Easy’s represented with arithmetic. Hard is represented with the calculations of quantum mechanics. Which, oddly, look very much like arithmetic. even has fewer symbols than has. But the symbols mean different abstract things. In a quantum mechanics context, ‘A’ and ‘B’ represent — well, possibly matrices. More likely operators. Operators work a lot like functions and I’m going to skip discussing the ways they don’t. Multiplying operators together — B times A, here — works by using the range of one function as the domain of the other. Like, imagine ‘B’ means ‘take the square of’ and ‘A’ means ‘take the sine of’. Then ‘BA’ would mean ‘take the square of the sine of’ (something). The fun part is the ‘AB’ would mean ‘take the sine of the square of’ (something). Which is fun because most of the time, those won’t have the same value. We accept that, mathematically. It turns out to work well for some quantum mechanics properties, even though it doesn’t work like regular arithmetic. So holds complexity, or at least strangeness, in its few symbols.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie rerun for the 16th of August, 2019. Essays exploring something mentioned by Archie ought to be at this link. The strip is in perpetual reruns but I don’t think I’ve exhausted the cycle of comics they reprint yet.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 16th is a joke about doing arithmetic on your fingers and toes. That’s enough for me.

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There were some more comic strips which just mentioned mathematics in passing.

Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s The Chuckle Brothers rerun for the 11th has a blackboard of mathematics used to represent deep thinking. Also, it I think, the colorist didn’t realize that they were standing in front of a blackboard. You can see mathematicians doing work in several colors, either to convey information in shorthand or because they had several colors of chalk. Not this way, though.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 16th mentions “being good at math” as something to respect cows for. The comic’s just this past week started over from its beginning. If you’re interested in deeply weird and long-since cancelled comics this is as good a chance to jump on as you can get.

And Stephen ‘s Herb and Jamaal rerun for the 16th has a kid worried about a mathematics test.

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That’s the mathematically-themed comic strips for last week. All my Reading the Comics essays should be at this link. I’ve traditionally run at least one essay a week on Sunday. But recently that’s moved to Tuesday for no truly compelling reason. That seems like it’s working for me, though. I may stick with it. If you do have an opinion about Sunday versus Tuesday please let me know.

Don’t let me know on Twitter. I continue to have this problem where Twitter won’t load on Safari. I don’t know why. I’m this close to trying it out on a different web browser.

And, again, I’m planning a fresh A To Z sequence. It’s never to early to think of mathematics topics that I might explain. I should probably have already started writing some. But you’ll know the official announcement when it comes. It’ll have art and everything.

Reading the Comics, July 2, 2019: Back On Schedule Edition

I hoped I’d get a Reading the Comics post in for Tuesday, and even managed it. With this I’m all caught up to the syndicated comic strips which, last week, brought up some mathematics topic. I’m open for nominations about what to publish here Thursday. Write in quick.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 30th is a struggling-student joke. And set in summer school, so the comic can be run the last day of June without standing out to its United States audience. It expresses a common anxiety, about that point when mathematics starts using letters. It superficially seems strange that this change worries students. Students surely had encountered problems where some term in an equation was replaced with a blank space and they were expected to find the missing term. This is the same work as using a letter. Still, there are important differences. First is that a blank line (box, circle, whatever) has connotations of “a thing to be filled in”. A letter seems to carry meaning in to the problem, even if it’s just “x marks the spot”. And a letter, as we use it in English, always stands for the same thing (or at least the same set of things). That ‘x’ may be 7 in one problem and 12 in another seems weird. I mean weird even by the standards of English orthography.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 30th of June, 2019. Essays with some mention of Rhymes With Orange should be at this link.

A letter might represent a number whose value we wish to know; it might represent a number whose value we don’t care about. These are different ideas. We usually fall into a convention where numbers we wish to know are more likely x, y, and z, while those we don’t care about are more likely a, b, and c. But even that’s no reliable rule. And there may be several letters in a single equation. It’s one thing to have a single unknown number to deal with. To have two? Three? I don’t blame people fearing they can’t handle that.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy for the 30th has Billy and Cow pondering the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is one of the first examples someone encounters in game theory. Game theory sounds like the most fun part of mathematics. It’s the study of situations in which there’s multiple parties following formal rules which allow for gains or losses. This is an abstract description. It means many things fit a mathematician’s idea of a game.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 30th of June, 2019. The comic strip is long since ended, but hasn’t quite rerun enough times for me to get tired of it. So essays featuring Cow and Boy appear this link. The gnome is a lawn gnome who came to life and … you know, this was a pretty weird comic and I understand why it didn’t make it in the newspapers. Just roll with it.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is described well enough by Billy. It’s built on two parties, each — separately and without the ability to coordinate — having to make a choice. Both would be better off, under interrogation, to keep quiet and trust that the cops can’t get anything significant on them. But both have the temptation that if they rat out the other, they’ll get off free while their former partner gets screwed. And knowing that their partner has the same temptation. So what would be best for the two of them requires them both doing the thing that maximizes their individual risk. The implication is unsettling: everyone acting in their own best interest is supposed to produce the best possible result for society. And here, for the society of these two accused, it breaks down entirely.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 1st is a rerun. I discussed it last time it appeared, in November 2016, which was before I would routinely include the strips under discussion. The strip’s built on wordplay, using the word ‘power’ in its connotations for might and for exponents.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby rerun for the 1st of July, 2019. I think but am not sure that this comic strip has lapsed into eternal reruns. In any case the essays that mention some topic raised by Robbie and Bobby are at this link.

Exponents have been written as numbers in superscript following a base for a long while now. The notation developed over the 17th century. I don’t know why mathematicians settled on superscripts, as opposed to the many other ways a base and an exponent might fit together. It’s a good mnemonic to remember, say, “z raised to the 10th” is z with a raised 10. But I don’t know the etymology of “raised” in a mathematical context well enough. It’s plausible that we say “raised” because that’s what the notation suggests.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 2nd argues for the beauty of mathematics as a use for it. It’s presented in a brutal manner, but saying brutal things to kids is a comic motif with history to it. Well, in an existentialist manner, but that gets pretty brutal quickly.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 2nd of July, 2019. This one doesn’t appear in every Reading the Comics essay, so you can find my discussions inspired by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal at this link.

The proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is one of the very many known to humanity. This one is among the family of proofs that are wordless. At least nearly wordless. You can get from here to with very little prompting. If you do need prompting, it’s this: there are two expressions for how much area of the square with sides a-plus-b. One of these expressions uses only terms of a and b. The other expression uses terms of a, b, and c. If this doesn’t get a bit of a grin out of you, don’t worry. There’s, like, 2,037 other proofs we already know about. We might ask whether we need quite so many proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. It doesn’t seem to be under serious question most of the time.

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And then a couple comic strips last week just mentioned mathematics. Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals for the 1st of July has the kids trying to understand their mathematics homework. Could have been anything. Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 5th started a sequence with the kids at Math Camp. The comic is trying quite hard to get me riled up. So far it’s been the kids agreeing that mathematics is the worst, and has left things at that. Hrmph.

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Whether or not I have something for Thursday, by Sunday I should have anotherReading the Comics post. It, as well as my back catalogue of these essays, should be at this link. Thanks for worrying about me.

Reading the Comics, November 9, 2018: Standing For Things Edition

There was something in common in two of the last five comic strips worth attention from last week. That’s good enough to give the essay its name.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 8th showcases Toby discovering the point of letters in algebra. It’s easy to laugh at him being ignorant. But the use of letters this way is something it’s easy to miss. You need first to realize that we don’t need to have a single way to represent a number. Which is implicit in learning, say, that you can write ‘7’ as the Roman numeral ‘VII’ or so, but I’m not sure that’s always clear. And realizing that you could use any symbol to write out ‘7’ if you agree that’s what the symbol means? That’s an abstraction tossed onto people who often aren’t really up for that kind of abstraction. And that we can have a symbol for “a number whose identity we don’t yet know”? Or even “a number whose identity we don’t care about”? Don’t blame someone for rearing back in confusion at this.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 8th of November, 2018. I’m sorry I can’t figure out the names of Toby’s friends here. Character lists, cartoonists, please.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 8th talks about vectors and scalars. And about the little ways that instructors in one subject can sabotage one another. In grad school I was witness to the mathematics department feeling quite put-upon by the engineering departments, who thought we were giving their students inadequate calculus training. Meanwhile we couldn’t figure out what they were telling students about calculus except that it was screwing up their understanding.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 8th of November, 2018. Also, shouldn’t that be “displacement in apple-space”?

To a physicist, a vector is a size and a direction together. (At least until they get seriously into mathematical physics when they need a more abstract idea.) A scalar is a number. Like, a real-valued number such as ‘4’. Maybe a complex-valued number such as ‘4 + 6i’. Vectors are great because a lot of physics problems become easier when thought of in terms of directions and amounts in that direction.

A mathematician would start out with vectors and scalars like that. But then she’d move into a more abstract idea. A vector, to a mathematician, is a thing you can add to another vector and get a vector out. A scalar is something that’s not a vector but that, multiplied by a vector, gets you a vector out. This sounds circular. But by defining ‘vector’ and ‘scalar’ in how they interact with each other we get a really sweet flexibility. We can use the same reasoning — and the same proofs — for lots of things. Directions, yes. But also matrices, and continuous functions, and probabilities of events, and more. That’s a bit much to give the engineering student who’s trying to work out some problem about … I don’t know. Whatever they do over in that department. Truss bridges or electrical circuits or something.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 9th of November, 2018. It first ran the 19th of March, 2012.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy for the 9th is really about misheard song lyrics, a subject that will never die now that we don’t have the space to print lyrics in the album lining anymore, or album linings. But it has a joke resonant with that of The Buckets, in supposing that algebra is just some bunch of letters mixed up with numbers. And Cow and Boy was always a strip I loved, as baffling as it might be to a casual reader. It had a staggering number of running jokes, although not in this installment.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 9th of November, 2018. It first ran the 9th of November, 1990.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 9th shows Brad happy to work out arithmetic when it’s for something he’d like to know. The figure Luan gives is ridiculously high, though. If he needs 500 hairs, and one new hair grows in each week, then that’s a little under ten years’ worth of growth. Nine years and a bit over seven months to be exact. If a moustache hair needs to be a half-inch long, and it grows at 1/8th of an inch per month, then it takes four months to be sufficiently long. So in the slowest possible state it’d be nine years, eleven months. I can chalk Luann’s answer up to being snidely pessimistic about his hair growth. But his calculator seems to agree and that suggests something went wrong along the way.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 9th of November, 2018. Again, character lists. I don’t know which of the characters this is except that he’s either very small or has an enormous pencil.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 9th is a story problem joke. It looks to me like a reasonable story problem, too: the distance travelled and the speed are reasonable, and give sensible numbers. The two stops add a bit of complication that doesn’t seem out of line. And the kid’s confusion is fair enough. It takes some experience to realize that the problem splits into an easy part, a hard part, and an easy part. The first easy part is how long the stops take all together. That’s 25 minutes. The hard part is realizing that if you want to know the total travel time it doesn’t matter when the stops are. You can find the total travel time by adding together the time spent stopped with the time spent driving. And the other easy part is working out how long it takes to go 80 miles if you travel at 55 miles per hour. That’s just a division. So find that and add to it the 25 minutes spent at the two stops.

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The various Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link. Essays which discuss The Buckets are at this link. The incredibly many essays mentioning Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link. Essays which mention Cow and Boy are at this link. Essays inspired in part by Luann, both the current-day and the vintage 1990 run, are at this link. The credibly many essays mentioning Maria’s Day are at this link.

And through the end of December my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should have two new posts a week. You might like some of them.

Reading the Comics, June 27, 2018: Stitch Day Edition

For a while I thought this essay would include only the mathematically-themed strips which Comic Strip Master Command sent out through to June 26th, which is picking up the nickname Stitch Day (for 6-26, the movie character’s experiment number). And then I decided some from last Sunday weren’t on-point enough (somehow), and there were enough that came later in the week that I couldn’t do a June 26th Only edition. Which is my longwinded way of saying this one doesn’t have a nonsense name. It just has a name that’s only partially on point.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 26th is the Rubik’s Cube/strange geometry joke for the week. It seems to me I ought to be able to make some link between the number of various ways to arrange a Rubik’s Cube — which pieces can and which ones cannot be neighbors to a red piece, say, no matter how one scrambles the cube — and the networking between people that you can get from an office where people have to see each other. But I’m not sure that I can make that metaphor work. I’m blaming the temperature, both mine (I have a cold) and the weather’s (it’s a heat wave).

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 26th of June, 2018. Say what you will; at least it’s not an open-office plan.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy for the 26th makes literal the trouble some people have with the phrase “110 percent”. Read uncharitably, yes, “110 of a hundred” doesn’t make sense, if 100 percent is all that could conceivably be of the thing. But if we can imagine, say, the number of cars passing a point on the highway being 90 percent of the typical number, surely we can imagine the number of cars also being 110 percent. To give an example of why I can’t side with pedants in objecting to the phrase.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy for the 26th of June, 2018. This strip originally ran the 12th of October, 2011 and it’s not usually so gruesome.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 26th is just itching for a fight. From me and from the Creative Writing department. Yes, mathematics rewards discipline. All activities do. At the risk of making a prescription: if you want to do something well, spend time practicing the boring parts. For arithmetic, that’s times tables and regrouping calculations and factoring and long division. For writing, that’s word choice and sentence structure and figuring how to bring life to describing dull stuff. Do the fun stuff too, yes, but because it is fun. Getting good at the boring stuff makes you an expert. When you discover that the boring stuff is also kinda fun, you will do the fun stuff masterfully.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 26th of June, 2018. Again I apologize; I don’t know who the student is. Cast lists, cartoonists. Get your cast on your web page.

But to speak of mathematics as pursuing a single right answer — well, perhaps. In an elementary-school problem there is typically just the one right answer, and the hope is that students learn how to get there efficiently. But if the subject is something well-worn, then there are many ways to do any problem. All are legitimate and the worst one can say of a method is maybe it’s not that efficient, or maybe it’s good here but doesn’t generally work. If the subject is on the edge of what mathematics we know, there may be only one way to get there. But there are many things to find, including original ways to understand what we have already found. To not see that mathematics is creative is to not see mathematics. Or, really, any field of human activity.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 27th of June, 2018. So, how would you rewrite the horoscope to make this work for multiplication? ‘You’re encountering some surprising times’?

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 27th edges up to being the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. I need a good name for this sort of joke about mathematical constructs made tangible, even if they aren’t necessarily characters.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th I hope makes sense if you just know the words “graph” and “drunk”, and maybe “McNugget”. That’s all you truly need to understand why this contains a joke. But there is some good serious mathematical terminology at work here.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th of June, 2018. Can’t be intended, but that graph looks to me like plots of what the constellation Orion is expected to look like after several ten thousand years of stellar movement.

So. A “graph” is a thing that’s turned up in my A To Z serieses. In this context a graph is a collection of points, called “vertices”, and a collection of “edges” that connect vertices. Often the vertices represent something of interest and the edges ways to turn one thing into another. Sometimes the edges are the thing of interest and the vertices are just there to be manipulated in some way by edges. It’s a way to make visual the studying of how stuff is connected, and how things can pass from one to another.

A “stochastic process” is about random variables. Random variables are some property about a system. And you know some things about that variable’s value. You know maybe the range of possible values it could have. You know whether some values are more likely than others. But you do not know what the value is at any particular moment. Consider, say, the temperature outside where you live at a particular time of day. You may have no idea what that is. But you can say, for example, whether today it is more likely to be 90 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 20 degrees Fahrenheit. For a stochastic process we have some kind of index. We can say, for example, which values of temperature are more likely today, the 1st of July, and which ones will be more likely the 1st of August, and which ones will be less likely the 1st of December. Calling it a “process”, to my intuition, makes it sound like we expect something to happen that causes the likelihood of some temperatures to change. And many processes are time-indexed. They study problems where something interesting changes in time, predictable in aggregate but not in detail.

So a graph like this, representing a stochastic process, is a shorthand. Each vertex is a state that something might be in. Each edge is a way to get from one state to another when — something — happens. Doesn’t matter what thing.

A “drunk walk”, or as it’s known to tenderer writers a “random walk”, is a term of art. Not a deep one. It’s meant to evoke the idea of a severely drunk person who yes, can move, but has no control over which way. Thus he wanders around, reaching any point only by luck. Many things look like random walks, in which there is no overall direction, just an unpredictable shuffling around. A drunk walk on this graph would be, well, start at any of the vertices. Then follow edges, chosen randomly. If you start at the uppermost point of the triangle on top, for example, there’s two places to go on the second step: the lower-left or the center-right vertex on the upper triangle. Suppose you go to the center-right vertex. On the next step, you might go right back where you started. You might go to the lower-left vertex on the triangle. You might drop down that bridge to the top of that quadrilateral. And so on, for another step.

Do that some presumably big number of times. Where are you? … Anywhere, of course. But are there vertices you’re more likely to be on? Ones you’re less likely to be on? How does the shape of the graph affect that likelihood? How does how long you spend walking affect that? These tell us things about the process, and are why someone would draw this graph and talk about a random walk on it.

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If you’d like to read more of my comic-strip review posts please do! They all should be available at this link, listed in reverse chronological order.

To read more of the individual comics? Here are essays with Cornered in them. These are Cow and Boy comics at this link. Frazz strips are here. Essays including Dark Side of the Horse are here. And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which is threatening to take over “being the majority of my blog” from Andertoons, I have at that link.

Reading the Comics, January 23, 2018: Adult Content Edition

I was all set to say how complaining about GoComics.com’s pages not loading had gotten them fixed. But they only worked for Monday alone; today they’re broken again. Right. I haven’t tried sending an error report again; we’ll see if that works. Meanwhile, I’m still not through last week’s comic strips and I had just enough for one day to nearly enough justify an installment for the one day. Should finish off the rest of the week next essay, probably in time for next week.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 23rd circles around some of Zeno’s Paradoxes. At the heart of some of them is the question of whether a thing can be divided infinitely many times, or whether there must be some smallest amount of a thing. Zeno wonders about space and time, but you can do as well with substance, with matter. Mathematics majors like to say the problem is easy; Zeno just didn’t realize that a sum of infinitely many things could be a finite and nonzero number. This misses the good question of how the sum of infinitely many things, none of which are zero, can be anything but infinitely large? Or, put another way, what’s different in adding and adding that the one is infinitely large and the other not?

Or how about this. Pick your favorite string of digits. 23. 314. 271828. Whatever. Add together the series — except that you omit any terms that have your favorite string there. So, if you picked 23, don’t add , or , or or such. That depleted series does converge. The heck is happening there? (Here’s why it’s true for a single digit being thrown out. Showing it’s true for longer strings of digits takes more work but not really different work.)

J C Duffy’s Lug Nuts for the 23rd is, I think, the first time I have to give a content warning for one of these. It’s a porn-movie advertisement spoof. But it mentions Einstein and Pi and has the tagline “she didn’t go for eggheads … until he showed her a new equation!”. So, you know, it’s using mathematics skill as a signifier of intelligence and riffing on the idea that nerds like sex too.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not for the 23rd has a trivia that made me initially think “not”. It notes Vince Parker, Senior and Junior, of Alabama were both born on Leap Day, the 29th of February. I’ll accept this without further proof because of the very slight harm that would befall me were I to accept this wrongly. But it also asserted this was a 1-in-2.1-million chance. That sounded wrong. Whether it is depends on what you think the chance is of.

Because what’s the remarkable thing here? That a father and son have the same birthday? Surely the chance of that is 1 in 365. The father could be born any day of the year; the son, also any day. Trusting there’s no influence of the father’s birthday on the son’s, then, 1 in 365 it is. Or, well, 1 in about 365.25, since there are leap days. There’s approximately one leap day every four years, so, surely that, right?

And not quite. In four years there’ll be 1,461 days. Four of them will be the 29th of January and four the 29th of September and four the 29th of August and so on. So if the father was born any day but leap day (a “non-bissextile day”, if you want to use a word that starts a good fight in a Scrabble match), the chance the son’s birth is the same is 4 chances in 1,461. 1 in 365.25. If the father was born on Leap Day, then the chance the son was born the same day is only 1 chance in 1,461. Still way short of 1-in-2.1-million. So, Graziano’s Ripley’s is wrong if that’s the chance we’re looking at.

Ah, but what if we’re looking at a different chance? What if we’re looking for the chance that the father is born the 29th of February and the son is also born the 29th of February? There’s a 1-in-1,461 chance the father’s born on Leap Day. And a 1-in-1,461 chance the son’s born on Leap Day. And if those events are independent, the father’s birth date not influencing the son’s, then the chance of both those together is indeed 1 in 2,134,521. So Graziano’s Ripley’s is right if that’s the chance we’re looking at.

Which is a good reminder: if you want to work out the probability of some event, work out precisely what the event is. Ordinary language is ambiguous. This is usually a good thing. But it’s fatal to discussing probability questions sensibly.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 23rd presents his mathematician discovering a new set of numbers. This will happen. Mathematics has had great success, historically, finding new sets of things that look only a bit like numbers were understood. And showing that if they follow rules that are, as much as possible, like the old numbers, we get useful stuff out of them. The mathematician claims to be a formalist, in the punch line. This is a philosophy that considers mathematical results to be the things you get by starting with some symbols and some rules for manipulating them. What this stuff means, and whether it reflects anything of interest in the real world, isn’t of interest. We can know the results are good because they follow the rules.

This sort of approach can be fruitful. It can force you to accept results that are true but intuition-defying. And it can give results impressive confidence. You can even, at least in principle, automate the creating and the checking of logical proofs. The disadvantages are that it takes forever to get anything done. And it’s hard to shake the idea that we ought to have some idea what any of this stuff means.

Reading the Comics, September 9, 2017: First Split Week Edition, Part 2

I don’t actually like it when a split week has so many more comics one day than the next, but I also don’t like splitting across a day if I can avoid it. This week, I had to do a little of both since there were so many comic strips that were relevant enough on the 8th. But they were dominated by the idea of going back to school, yet.

Randy Glasbergen’s Glasbergen Cartoons rerun for the 8th is another back-to-school gag. And it uses arithmetic as the mathematics at its most basic. Arithmetic might not be the most fundamental mathematics, but it does seem to be one of the parts we understand first. It’s probably last to be forgotten even on a long summer break.

Mark Pett’s Mr Lowe rerun for the 8th is built on the familiar old question of why learn arithmetic when there’s computers. Quentin is unconvinced of this as motive for learning long division. I’ll grant the case could be made better. I admit I’m not sure how, though. I think long division is good as a way to teach, especially, the process of estimating and improving estimates of a calculation. There’s a lot of real mathematics in doing that.

Guy Gilchrist’s Nancy for the 8th is another back-to-school strip. Nancy’s faced with “this much math” so close to summer. Her given problem’s a bit of a mess to me. But it’s mostly teaching whether the student’s got the hang of the order of operations. And the instructor clearly hasn’t got the sense right. People can ask whether we should parse “12 divided by 3 times 4” as “(12 divided by 3) times 4” or as “12 divided by (3 times 4)”, and that does make a major difference. Multiplication commutes; you can do it in any order. Division doesn’t. Leaving ambiguous phrasing is the sort of thing you learn, instinctively, to avoid. Nancy would be justified in refusing to do the problem on the grounds that there is no unambiguous way to evaluate it, and that the instructor surely did not mean for her to evaluate it all four different plausible ways.

By the way, I’ve seen going around Normal Person Twitter this week a comment about how they just discovered the division symbol ÷, the obelus, is “just” the fraction bar with dots above and below where the unknown numbers go. I agree this is a great mnemonic for understanding what is being asked for with the symbol. But I see no evidence that this is where the symbol, historically, comes from. We first see ÷ used for division in the writings of Johann Henrich Rahn, in 1659, and the symbol gained popularity particularly when John Pell picked it up nine years later. But it’s not like Rahn invented the symbol out of nowhere; it had been used for subtraction for over 125 years at that point. There were also a good number of writers using : or / or \ for division. There were some people using a center dot before and after a / mark for this, like the % sign fell on its side. That ÷ gained popularity in English and American writing seems to be a quirk of fate, possibly augmented by it being relatively easy to produce on a standard typewriter. (Florian Cajori notes that the National Committee on Mathematical Requirements recommended dropping ÷ altogether in favor of a symbol that actually has use in non-mathematical life, the / mark. The Committee recommended this in 1923, so you see how well the form agenda is doing.)

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 8th is the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for this week. A week without one is always a bit … peculiar.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 9th only mentions mathematics, and that as a course that Billy would rather be skipping. But I like the comic strip and want to promote its memory as much as possible. It’s a deeply weird thing, because it has something like 400 running jokes, and it’s hard to get into because the first couple times you see a pastoral conversation interrupted by an orca firing a bazooka at a cat-helicopter while a panda brags of blowing up the moon it seems like pure gibberish. If you can get through that, you realize why this is funny.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 9th uses chalkboards full of stuff as the sign of a professor doing serious thinking. Mathematics is will-suited for chalkboards, at least in comic strips. It conveys a lot of thought and doesn’t need much preplanning. Although a joke about the difficulties in planning out blackboard use does take that planning. Yes, there is a particular pain that comes from having more stuff to write down in the quick yet easily collaborative medium of the chalkboard than there is board space to write.

Brian Basset’s Red and Rover for the 9th also really only casually mentions mathematics. But it’s another comic strip I like a good deal so would like to talk up. Anyway, it does show Red discovering he doesn’t mind doing mathematics when he sees the use.

2012 in Review

I should maybe close out the Christmas/New Year season with the report of statistics which WordPress prepared about my little blog here. Of course they keep statistics; one of the big changes in human thought in the 20th century was that pretty near everything could not only be measured but that they could be measured statistically: what are the mean, the mode, the variances, how do things correlate, what can be done to maximize the desired and minimize the unwanted?

I don’t do quite that much tracking myself, as it’s a little too much work when all I’m doing is pointing out how Cow and Boy mentioned frustum volume formulas or something, but I do like watching the counter flicker as people find that, mostly, they want to see me talking about the area of a trapezoid. That’s by far the most popular thing I wrote in 2012, and all based on my fumbling the middle of a class. Had I not attempted to improvise in class, I would be less popular on the Internet. There’s a lesson here for our times and I don’t know what it is.

Reading the Comics, July 28, 2012

I intend to be back to regular mathematics-based posts soon. I had a fine idea for a couple posts based on Sunday’s closing of the Diaster Transport roller coaster ride at Cedar Point, actually, although I have to technically write them first. (My bride and I made a trip to the park to get a last ride in before its closing, and that lead to inspiration.) But reviews of math-touching comic strips are always good for my readership, if I’m readin the statistics page here right, so let’s see what’s come up since the last recap, going up to the 14th of July.