Once more Comic Strip Master Command shows great parsimony with its mathematics-themed comic strips. The one with most substance to it is Dan Thompson’s Brevity, and even that’s not one I can talk about at length. Watch me try, anyway.
It happens that “smooth” is also a term of mathematical art. It refers to a function that you can take enough derivatives of. “Enough” here depends on our use. Depending on what our work is, we might need anything from one derivative to infinitely many derivatives. I’m not sure that I would call the ordinary arithmetic-type addition operator “smooth”. But I’m not confident in saying it’s not.
Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 12th of July is more wordplay than mathematics play. I’m including it because I like the playful energy of the comic strip and want more people to notice it. I like the idea of calling such an assembled doll a fraction figure, though.
Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 14th of July is your usual story problem setup. It’s a standard enough insult joke, although it does use the mathematics content. There aren’t a lot of spelling questions that would let you set up an ambiguous “how many are left” joke. Maybe an English class.
There were a couple more comic strips in the block of time I want to write about. Only one’s got some deeper content and, I admit, I had to work to find it.
Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 8th has Nancy and Sluggo avoiding mathematics homework. Or, “practice”, anyway. There’s more, though; Nancy and Sluggo are doing some analysis of viewing angles. That’s actual mathematics, certainly. Computer-generated imagery depends on it, just like you’d imagine. There are even fun abstract questions that can give surprising insights into numbers. For example: imagine that space were studded, at a regular square grid spacing, with perfectly reflective marbles of uniform size. Is there, then, a line of sight between any two points outside any marbles? Even if it requires tens of millions of reflections; we’re interested in what perfect reflections would give us.
Using playing cards as a makeshift protractor is a creative bit of making do with what you have. The cards spread in a fanfold easily enough and there’s marks on the cards that you can use to keep your measurements reasonably uniform. Creating ad hoc measurement tools like this isn’t mathematics per se. But making a rough tool is a first step to making a precise tool. And you can use reason to improve your estimates.
It’s not on-point, but I did want to share the most wondrous ad hoc tool I know of: You can use an analog clock hand, and the sun, as a compass. You don’t even need a real clock; you can draw the time on a sheet of paper and use that. It’s not a precise measure, of course. But if you need some help, here you go. You’ve got it.
There were a good number of comic strips mentioning mathematical subjects last week, as you might expect for one including the 14th of March. Most of them were casual mentions, though, so that’s why this essay looks like this. And is why the week will take two pieces to finish.
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayer’s Little Oop for the 8th is part of a little storyline for the Sunday strips. In this the young Alley Oop has … travelled in time to the present. But different from how he does in the weekday strips. What’s relevant about this is Alley Oop hearing the year “2020” and mentioning how “we just got math where I come from” but being confident that’s either 40 or 400. Which itself follows up a little thread in the Sunday strips about new numbers on display and imagining numbers greater than three.
Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 9th is a memorial strip to Katherine Johnson. She was, as described, a NASA mathematician, and one of the great number of African-American women whose work computing was rescued from obscurity by the book and movie Hidden Figures. NASA, and its associated agencies, do a lot of mathematical work. Much of it is numerical mathematics: a great many orbital questions, for example, can not be answered with, like, the sort of formula that describes how far away a projectile launched on a parabolic curve will land. Creating a numerical version of a problem requires insight and thought about how to represent what we would like to know. And calculating that requires further insight, so that the calculation can be done accurately and speedily. (I think about sometime doing a bit about the sorts of numerical computing featured in the movie, but I would hardly be the first.)
I also had thought the Mathematical Moments from the American Mathematical Society had posted an interview with her last year. I was mistaken but in, I think, a forgivable way. In the episode “Winning the Race”, posted the 12th of June, they interviewed Christine Darden, another of the people in the book, though not (really) the movie. Darden joined NASA in the late 60s. But the interview does talk about this sort of work, and how it evolved with technology. And, of course, mentions Johnson and her influence.
Graham Harrop’s Ten Cats for the 9th is another strip mentioning Albert Einstein and E = mc2. And using the blackboard full of symbols to represent deep thought.
Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 10th showcases Todd being terrified of fractions. And more terrified of story problems. I can’t call it a false representation of the kinds of mathematics that terrify people.
Stephen Beals’s Adult Children for the 11th has a character mourning that he took calculus as he’s “too stupid to be smart”. Knowing mathematics is often used as proof of intelligence. And calculus is used as the ultimate of mathematics. It’s a fair question why calculus and not some other field of mathematics, like differential equations or category theory or topology. Probably it’s a combination of slightly lucky choices (for calculus). Calculus is old enough to be respectable. It’s often taught as the ultimate mathematics course that people in high school or college (and who aren’t going into a mathematics field) will face. It’s a strange subject. Learning it requires a greater shift in thinking about how to solve problems than even learning algebra does. And the name is friendly enough, without the wordiness or technical-sounding language of, for example, differential equations. The subject may be well-situated.
Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 11th has the pacing of a logic problem, something like the Liar’s Paradox. It’s also about homework which happens to be geometry, possibly because the cartoonists aren’t confident that kids that age might be taking a logic course.
I’ll have the rest of the week’s strips, including what Comic Strip Master Command ordered done for Pi Day, soon. And again I mention that I’m hosting this month’s Playful Math Education Blog Carnival. If you have come across a web site with some bit of mathematics that brought you delight and insight, please let me know, and mention any creative projects that you have, that I may mention that too. Thank you.
I was away from home most of last week. Comic Strip Master Command was kind and acknowledged this. There wasn’t much for me to discuss. There’s not even many comics too slight to discuss. I thank them for their work in not overloading me. But if you wondered why Sunday’s post was what it was, you now know. I suspect you didn’t wonder.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 29th of July is a comfortable and familiar face for these Reading the Comics posts. I’m glad to see it. The joke is built on negative numbers, and Wavehead’s right to say this is kind of the reason people hate mathematics. At least, that mathematicians will become comfortable with something that has a clear real-world intuitive meaning, such as that adding things together gets you a bigger thing. And then for good reasons of logic get to counter-intuitive things, such as adding things together to get a lesser thing. Negative numbers might be the first of these intuition-breaking things that people encounter. That or fractions. I encounter stories of people who refuse to accept that, say, is smaller than , although I’ve never seen it myself.
So why do mathematicians take stuff like “adding” and break it? Convenience, I suppose, is the important reason. Having negative numbers lets us treat “having a quantity” and “lacking a quantity” using the same mechanisms. So that’s nice to have. If we have positive and negative numbers, then we can treat “adding” and “subtracting” using the same mechanisms. That’s nice to do. The trouble is then knowing, like, “if -3 times 4 is greater than -16, is -3 times -4 greater than 16? Or less than? Why?”
Jeffrey Caulfield and Brian Ponshock’s Yaffle for the 31st of July uses the blackboard-full-of-mathematics as shorthand for deep thought about topics. The equations don’t mean much of anything, individually or collectively. I’m curious whether Caulfield and Ponshock mean, in the middle there, for that equation to be π times y2 equalling z3, or whether it’s π times x times y2 that is. Doens’t matter either way. It’s just decoration.
And then there are the most marginal comic strips for the week. And if that first Yaffle didn’t count as too marginal to mention, think what that means for the others. Yaffle on the 28th of July features a mention of sudoku as the sort of thing one struggles to solve. Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 1st of August mentions mathematics as the sort of homework a parent can’t help with. Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon for the 2nd sets up a math contest. It’s mentioned as the sort of things the comic strip’s regular cast can’t hope to do.
So, it has been hot around here. Extremely hot. Like, hot to the point that there’s nothing to do but form hyperbolic statements about the heat. This does not help anyone feel cooler, but it does help us feel like we’re doing something relevant to the weather. The result is that I haven’t had time to think about my comic strip reading. I’ve been very busy trying to pop my head off and leave it in the freezer. This has not worked. Our refrigerator’s dying and we have a replacement scheduled to arrive this week.
The consequence is that I haven’t had time to write my paragraphs about the comic strips that mention mathematical issues of substance. To not be a complete void, though, let me give you the marginalia. These are the comics that mentioned mathematics in some way so slight that I don’t think them worth further discussion. I’ll get to substantial stuff Tuesday. Thank you.
Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 17th has a ‘Fake Maths’ textbook, the falseness of it proven by the arithmetic being wrong. So that uses a different part of mathematics’ reputation, that of giving us things we can know are certainly true, or certainly false.
This has not been the slowest week for mathematically-themed comic strips. The slowest would be the week nothing on topic came up. But this was close. I admit this is fine as I have things disrupting my normal schedule this week. I don’t need to write too many essays too.
On-topic enough to discuss, though, were:
Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha for the 9th features a teacher trying to get ahead of student boredom. The idea that mathematics is easier to learn if it’s about problems that seem interesting is a durable one. It agrees with my intuition. I’m less sure that just doing arithmetic while surfing is that helpful. My feeling is that a problem being interesting is separate from a problem naming an intersting thing. But making every problem uniquely interesting is probably too much to expect from a teacher. A good pop-mathematics writer can be interesting about any problem. But the pop-mathematics writer has a lot of choice about what she’ll discuss. And doesn’t need to practice examples of a problem until she can feel confident her readers have learned a skill. I don’t know that there is a good answer to this.
Also part of me feels that “eight sick waves times eight sick waves” has to be “sixty-four sick-waves-squared”. This is me worrying about the dimensional analysis of a joke. All right, but if it were “eight inches times eight inches” and you came back with “sixty-four inches” you’d agree something was off, right? But it’s easy to not notice the units. That we do, mechanically, the same thing in multiplying (oh) three times $1.20 or three times 120 miles or three boxes times 120 items per box as we do multiplying three times 120 encourages this. But if we are using numbers to measure things, and if we are doing calculations about things, then the units matter. They carry information about the kinds of things our calculations represent. It’s a bad idea to misuse or ignore those tools.
Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 14th is roughly the anthropomorphized geometry cartoon of the week. It does name the three ways to group triangles based on how many sides have the same length. Or if you prefer, how many interior angles have the same measure. So it’s probably a good choice for your geometry tip sheet. “Scalene” as a word seems to have entered English in the 1730s. Its origin traces to Late Latin “scalenus”, from the Greek “skalenos” and meaning “uneven” or “crooked”.
“Isosceles” also goes to Late Latin and, before that, the Greek “isoskeles”, with “iso” the prefix meaning “equal” and “skeles” meaning “legs”. The curious thing to me is “Isosceles”, besides sounding more pleasant, came to English around 1550. Meanwhile, “equilateral” — a simple Late Latin for “equal sides” — appeared around 1570. I don’t know what was going on that it seemed urgent to have a word for triangles with two equal sides first, and a generation later triangles with three equal sides. And then triangles with no two equal sides went nearly two centuries without getting a custom term.
But, then, I’m aware of my bias. There might have been other words for these concepts, recognized by mathematicians of the year 1600, that haven’t come to us. Or it might be that scalene triangles were thought to be so boring there wasn’t any point giving them a special name. It would take deeper mathematics history knowledge than I have to say.
Those are all the mathematically-themed comic strips I can find something to discuss from the past week. There were some others with mentions of mathematics, though. These include:
I do not know that the Ziggy printed here is a rerun. I don’t seem to have mentioned it in previous Reading the Comics posts, but that isn’t definite. How much mathematical content a comic strip needs to rate a mention depends on many things, and a strip that seems too slight one week might inspire me another. I’ll explain why I’ve started to get suspicious of the quite humanoid figure.
Tom II Wilson’s Ziggy for the 12th is framed around weather forecasts. It’s the probability question people encounter most often, unless they’re trying to outsmart the contestants on Let’s Make A Deal. (And many games on The Price Is Right, too.) Many people have complained about not knowing the meaning of a “50% chance of rain” for a day. If I understand it rightly, it means, when conditions have been like this in the recorded past, it’s rained about 50% of the time. I’m open to correction from meteorologists and it just occurred to me I know one. Mm.
Few people ask about the probability a forecast is correct. In some ways it’s an unanswerable question. To say there is a one-in-six chance a fairly thrown die will turn up a ‘1’ is not wrong just because it’s rolled a ‘1’ eight times out of the last ten. But it does seem like a forecast such as this should include a sense of confidence, how sure the forecaster is that the current weather is all that much like earlier times.
I’m not sure how much of the joke is meant to be the repetition of “50% chance”. The joke might be meant to say that if he’s got a 50% chance of being wrong, then, isn’t the 50% chance of rain “correctly” a 50% chance of not-rain … which is the same chance of rain? The logic doesn’t hold up, if you pay attention, but it sounds like it should make sense, and having the “wrong” version of something be the same as the original is a valid comic construction.
So now for the promised Ziggy rerun scandal. To the best of my knowledge Ziggy is presented as being in new run. It’s done by the son of the comic strip’s creator, but that’s common enough for long-running comic strips. This Monday, though, ran a Ziggy-at-the-psychiatrist joke that was, apart from coloring, exactly the comic run the 2nd of March, barely two weeks before. (Compare the scribbles in the psychiatrist’s diploma.) It wouldn’t be that weird if a comic were accidentally repeated; production mistakes happen, after all. It’s slightly weird that the daily, black-and-white, original got colored in two different ways, but I can imagine this happening by accident.
Still, that got me primed to look for Ziggy repeats. I couldn’t find this one having an earlier appearance. But I did find that the 9th of January this year was a reprint of the Ziggy from the 11th of January, 2017. I wrote about both appearances, without noticing they were reruns. Here’s the 2017 essay, and over here is the 2019 essay, from before I was very good at remembering what the year was. Mercifully I didn’t say anything contradictory on the two appearances. I’m more interested in how I said things differently in the two appearances. Anyway this earlier year seems to have been part of a week’s worth of reruns, noticeable by the copyright date. I can’t begrudge a cartoonist their vacation. The psychiatrist strip doesn’t seem to be part of that, though, and its repetition is some as-yet-unexplained event.
Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 13th has a much more casual and non-controversial bit of mathematics. Pete tosses out a calculate-the-square-root problem as a test of Peggy’s omniscience. One of the commenters points out that the square root of 532 is closer to 23.06512519 than it is Peggy’s 23.06512818. It suggests the writers found the square root by something that gave plenty of digits. For example, the macOS Calculator program offers me “23.065 125 189 341 592”. But then they chopped off, rather than rounding off, digits when the panel space ran out.
Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 13th has Nancy dividing up mathematics problems along the equals sign. That’s cute and fanciful enough. One could imagine working out expressions on either side of the equals sign in the hopes of getting them to match. That wouldn’t work for these algebra problems, but, that’s something.
This isn’t what Nancy might do, unless she flashed forward to college and became a mathematics or physics major. But one great trick in differential equations is called the separation of variables. Differential equations describe how quantities change. They’re great. They’re hard. A lot of solving differential equations amounts to rewriting them as simpler differential equations.
Separation is a trick usable when there’s two quantities whose variation affect each other. If you can rewrite the differential equation so that one variable only appears on the left side, and the other variable only appears on the right? Then you can split this equation into two simpler equations. Both sides of the equation have to be some fixed number. So you can separate the differential equations of two variables into two differential equations, each with one variable. One with the first variable, one with the other. And, usually, a differential equation of one variable is easier than a differential equation with two variables. So Nancy and Esther could work each half by themselves. But the work would have to be put together at the end, too.
There were a handful of comic strips from last week which I didn’t already discuss. Two of them inspire me to write about how we know how to do things. That makes a good theme.
Marcus Hamilton and Scott Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace for the 27th gets into deep territory. How does we could count to a million? Maybe some determined soul has actually done it. But it would take the better part of a month. Things improve some if we allow that anything a computing machine can do, a person could do. This seems reasonable enough. It’s heady to imagine that all the computing done to support, say, a game of Roller Coaster Tycoon could be done by one person working alone with a sheet of paper. Anyway, a computer could show counting up to a million, a billion, a trillion, although then we start asking whether anyone’s checked that it hasn’t skipped some numbers. (Don’t laugh. The New York Times print edition includes an issue number, today at 58,258, at the top of the front page. It’s meant to list the number of published daily editions since the paper started. They mis-counted once, in 1898, and nobody noticed until 1999.)
Anyway, allow that. Nobody doubts that, if we put enough time and effort into it, we could count up to any positive whole number, or as they say in the trade, “counting number”. But … there is some largest number that we could possibly count to, even if we put every possible resource and all the time left in the universe to that counting. So how do we know we “could” count to a number bigger than that? What does it mean to say we “could” if the circumstances of the universe are such that we literally could not?
Counting up to a number seems uncontroversial enough. If I wanted to prove it I’d say something like “if we can count to the whole number with value N, then we can count to the whole number with value N + 1 by … going one higher.” And “We can count to the whole number 1”, proving that by enunciating as clearly as I can. The induction follows. Fine enough. That’s a nice little induction proof.
But … what if we needed to do more work? What if we needed to do a lot of work? There is a corner of logic which considers infinitely long proofs, or infinitely long statements. They’re not part of the usual deductive logic that any mathematician knows and relies on. We’re used to, at least in principle, being able to go through and check every step of a proof. If that becomes impossible is that still a proof? It’s not my field, so I feel comfortable not saying what’s right and what’s wrong. But it is one of those lectures in your Mathematical Logic course that leaves you hanging your jaw open.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th is a joke about algorithms. These are the processes by which we know how to do a thing. Here, Hansel and Gretel are shown using what’s termed a “greedy algorithm” to follow pebbles back home. This kind of thing reflects trying to find an acceptable solution, in this case, finding a path somewhere. What makes it “greedy” is each step. You’re at a pebble. You can see other pebbles nearby. Which one do you go to? Go to some extreme one; in this case, the nearest. It could instead have been the biggest, or the shiniest, the one at the greatest altitude, the one nearest a water source. Doesn’t matter. You choose your summum bonum and, at each step, take the move that maximizes that.
The wicked mother knows something about this sort of algorithm, one that promises merely a solution and not the best solution. And that is that all these solutions can be broken. You can set up a problem that the algorithm can’t solve. Greedy algorithms are particularly vulnerable to this. They’re called “local maximums”. You find the best answer of the ones nearby, but not the best one you possibly could locate.
Why use an algorithm like this, that can be broken so? That’s because we often want to do problems like finding a path through the woods. There are so many possible paths that it’s hard to find one of the acceptable ones. But there are processes that will, typically, find an acceptable answer. Maybe processes that will let us take an acceptable answer and improve it to a good answer. And this is getting into my field.
Actual persons encountering one of these pebble rings would (probably) notice they were caught in a loop. And what they’d do, then, is suspend the greedy rule: instead of going to the nearest pebble they could find, they’d pick something else. Maybe simply the nearest pebble they hadn’t recently visited. Maybe the second-nearest pebble. Maybe they’d give up and strike out in a random direction, trusting they’ll find some more pebbles. This can lead them out of the local maximum they don’t want toward the “global maximum”, the path home, that they do. There’s no reason they can’t get trapped again — this is why the wicked mother made many loops — and no reason they might not get caught in a loop of loops again. Every algorithm like this can get broken by some problem, after all. But sometimes taking the not-the-best steps can lead you to a better solution. That’s the insight at the heart of “Metropolis-Hastings” algorithms, which was my field before I just read comic strips all the time.
The first two comics for this essay have titles of the form Name’s Thing, so, that’s why this edition title. That’s good enough, isn’t it? And besides this series there was a Perry Bible Fellowship which at least depicted mathematical symbols. It’s a rerun, though, even among those shown on GoComics.com. It was rerun recently enough that I featured it around here back in June. It’s a bit risque. But the strip was rerun the 12th. Maybe I also need to drop Perry Bible Fellowship from the roster of comics I read for this.
On to the comics I haven’t dropped.
Tony Buino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 11th tries using specific examples to teach mathematics. There’s strangeness to arithmetic. It’s about these abstract things like “thirty” and “addition” and such. But these things match very well the behaviors of discrete objects, ones that don’t blend together or shatter by themselves. So we can use the intuition we have for specific things to get comfortable working with the abstract. This doesn’t stop, either. Mathematicians like to work on general, abstract questions; they let us answer big swaths of questions all at once. But working out a specific case is usually easier, both to prove and to understand. I don’t know what’s the most advanced mathematics that could be usefully practiced by thinking about cupcakes. Probably something in group theory, in studying the rotations of objects that are perfectly, or nearly, rotationally symmetric.
John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 11th is a follow-up to a strip featured last week. Maria’s been getting help on her mathematics from one of her closet monsters. And includes the usual joke about Common Core being such a horrible thing that it must come from monsters. I don’t know whether in the comic strip’s universe the monster is supposed to be imaginary. (Usually, in a comic strip, the question of whether a character is imaginary-or-real is pointless. I think Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac is the only one to have done something good with it.) But if the closet monster is in Maria’s imagination, it’s quite in line for her to think that teaching comes from some malevolent and inscrutable force.
John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 11th of October, 2018. Yeah, snarking on Common Core is an easy joke, but then so is snarking on tofu dogs. I’ve been happy with Morningstar vegetarian hot dogs for years now, although I will admit we don’t usually have them as hot dogs but instead as ways to bulk up a macaroni and cheese or similar meal.
Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 12th features one of the first interesting mathematics questions you do in physics. This is often done with calculus. Not much, but more than Nancy and Esther could realistically have. It could be worked out experimentally, and that’s likely what the teacher was hoping for. Calculus isn’t really necessary, although it does show skeptical students there’s some value in all this d-dx business they’ve been working through. You can find the same answers by dimensional analysis, which is less intimidating. But you’d still need to know some trigonometry functions. That’s beyond whatever Nancy’s grade level is too. In any case, Nancy is an expert at identifying unstated assumptions, and working out loopholes in them. I’m curious whether the teacher would respect Nancy’s skill here. (The way the writing’s been going, I think she would.)
Francesco Marciuliano and Jim Keefe’s Sally Forth for the 13th is about new-friend Jenny trying to work out her relationship with Hilary-Faye-and-Nona. It’s a good bit of character work, but that is outside my subject here. In the last panel Nona admits she’s been talking, or at least thinking about τ versus π. This references a minor nerd-squabble that’s been going on a couple years. π is an incredibly well-known, useful number. It’s the only transcendental number you can expect a normal person to have ever heard of. Humans noticed it, historically, because the length of the circumference of a circle is π times the length of its diameter. Going between “the distance across” and “the distance around” turns out to be useful.
Francesco Marciuliano and Jim Keefe’s Sally Forth for the 13th of October, 2018. I like the composition in the first panel. It’s the rare cinematic angle that allows all four people who need to be in the panel to be shown without looking like a police lineup. (Which, yeah, the third panel kind of does. But I don’t know how to frame that so you can show all four characters and have the three talking, and have the dialogue balloons read in the logical order.)
The thing is, many mathematical and physics formulas find it more convenient to write things in terms of the radius of a circle or sphere. And this makes 2π show up in formulas. A lot. Even in things that don’t obviously have circles in them. For example, the Gaussian distribution, which describes how much a sample looks like the population it’s sampled from, has 2π in it. So, the τ argument does, why write out 2π all these places? Why not decide that that’s the useful number to think about, give it the catchy name τ, and use that instead? All the interesting questions about π have exact, obvious parallel questions about τ. Any answers about one give us answers about the other. So why not make this switch and then … pocket the savings in having shorter formulas?
You may sense in me a certain skepticism. I don’t see where changing over gets us anything worth the bother. But there are fashions in mathematics as with everything else. Perhaps τ has some ability to clarify things in ways we’ll come to better appreciate.
One of the comics from the last half of last week is here mostly because Roy Kassinger asked if I was going to include it. Which one? Read on and see.
Scott Metzger’s The Bent Pinky for the 24th is the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for the week. It’s pretty easy to learn, or memorize, or test small numbers for whether they’re prime. The bigger a number gets the harder it is. Mostly it takes time. You can rule some numbers out easily enough. If they’re even numbers other than 2, for example. Or if their (base ten) digits add up to a multiple of three or nine. But once you’ve got past a couple easy filters … you don’t have to just try dividing them by all the prime numbers up to their square root. Comes close, though. Would save a lot of time if the numerals worked that out ahead of time and then kept the information around, in case it were needed. Seems a little creepy to be asking that of other numbers, really. Certainly to give special privileges to numbers for accidents of their creation.
Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 25th is an iteration of bad-at-arithmetic jokes. In this case there’s the arithmetic that’s counting, and there’s the arithmetic that’s the addition and subtraction demanded for checkbook-balancing.
Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 25th of July, 2018. I don’t question the plausibility of people writing enough checks in 2018 that they need to balance them, even though my bank has been sold three times to new agencies before I’ve been able to use up one book of 25 checks. I do question whether people with the hobby of checkbook-balancing routinely do this outside, at the fence, while hanging out with the neighbor.
Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur for the 25th is an Einstein joke. In a rare move for the breed this doesn’t have “E = mc2” in it, except in the implication that it was easier to think of than squirrel-proof bird feeders would be. Einstein usually gets acclaim for mathematical physics work. But he was also a legitimate inventor, with patents in his own right. He and his student Leó Szilárd developed a refrigerator that used no moving parts. Most refrigeration technology requires the use of toxic chemicals to actually do the cooling. Einstein and Szilárd hoped to make something less likely to leak these toxins. The design never saw widespread use. Ordinary refrigerators, using freon (shockingly harmless biologically, though dangerous to the upper atmosphere) got reliable enough that the danger of leaks got tolerable. And the electromagnetic pump the machine used instead made noise that at least some reports say was unbearable. The design as worked out also used a potassium-sodium alloy, not the sort of thing easy to work with. Now and then there’s talk of reviving the design. Its potential, as something that could use any heat source to provide refrigeration, seems neat. And everybody in this side of science and engineering wants to work on something that Einstein touched.
Mort Walker and Greg Walker’s Beetle Bailey for the 26th is here by special request. I wasn’t sure it was on-topic enough for my usual rigorous standards. But there is some social-aspects-of-mathematics to it. The assumption that ‘five’ is naturally better than ‘four’ for example. There is the connotation that some numbers are better than others. Yes, there are famously lucky numbers like 7 or unlucky ones like 13 (in contemporary Anglo-American culture, anyway; others have different lucks). But there’s also the sense that a larger number is of course better than a smaller one.
Mort Walker and Greg Walker’s Beetle Bailey for the 26th of July, 2018. Mort Walker’s name is still on the credits, and in the signature. I don’t know whether they’re still working through comics which he had a hand in writing or drawing before his death in January. It would seem amazing to be seven months ahead of deadline — I’ve never got more than two weeks, myself, and even that by cheating — but he did have a pretty good handle on the kinds of jokes he should be telling.
Except when it’s not. A first-rate performance is understood to be better than a third-rate one. A star of the first magnitude is more prominent than one of the fourth. This whether we mean celebrities or heavenly bodies. We have mixed systems. One at least respects the heritage of ancient Greek astronomers, who rated the brightest of stars as first magnitude and the next bunch as second and so on. In this context, if we take brightness to be a good thing, we understand lower numbers to be better. Another system regards the larger numbers as being more of what we’re assumed to want, and therefore be better.
Nasty confusions will happen when the schemes of thought collide. Is a class three hurricane more or less of a threat than a class four? Ought we be more worried if the United States Department of Defense declares it’s moved from Defence Condition four to Defcon 3? In October 1966, the Fermi 1 fission reactor near Detroit suffered a “Class 1 emergency”. Does that mean the city was at the highest or the lowest health risk from the partial meltdown? (In this case, this particular term reflects the lowest actionable level of radiation was detected. I am not competent to speak on how great the risk to the population was.) It would have been nice to have unambiguous language on this point.
On to the joke’s logic, though. Wouldn’t General Halftrack be accustomed to thinking of lower numbers as better? Getting to the green in three strokes is obviously preferable to four, and getting there in five would be a disaster.
Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy for the 28th is an applied-probability strip. The calculating of odds is rich with mathematical and psychological influences. With some events it’s possible to define quite precisely what the odds should be. If there are a thousand numbers each equally likely to be the daily lottery winner, and only one that will be, we can go from that to saying what the chance of 254 being the winner is. But many events are impossible to forecast that way. We have to use other approaches. If something has happened several times recently, we can say it’s probably rather likely. Fluke events happen, yes. But we can do fairly good work by supposing that stuff is mostly normal, and that the next baseball season will look something like the last one.
As to how to bet wisely — well, many have tried to work that out. One of the big questions in financial mathematics is how to hedge bets. I write financial mathematics, but it applies to sports betting and really anything else with many outcomes. One of the common goals is to simply avoid catastrophe, to make sure that whatever happens you aren’t too badly off. This involves betting various amounts on many outcomes. More on the outcomes you think likely, but also some on the improbable outcomes. Long shots do sometimes happen, and pay out well; it can be worth putting a little money on that just in case. Judging the likelihood of those events, especially in complicated problems that can’t be reduced to logic, is one of the hard parts. If it could be made into a system we wouldn’t need people to do it. But it does seem that knowing what you bet on helps make better bets.
Last week started off going like Gangbusters, a phrase I think that’s too old-fashioned for my father to say but that I’ve picked up because I like listening to old-time radio and, you know, Gangbusters really does get going like that. Give it a try sometime, if you’re open to that old-fashioned sort of narrative style and blatant FBI agitprop. You might want to turn the volume down a little before you do. It slowed down the second half of the week, which is mostly fine as I’d had other things taking up my time. Let me finish off last week and hope there’s a good set of comics to review for next Sunday and maybe Tuesday.
Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 4th of May, 1978 was rerun the 28th of June. It’s got the form of your student-resisting-the-word-problem joke. And mixes in a bit of percentages which is all the excuse I need to include it here. That and how Shearer uses halftone screening. It’s also a useful reminder of how many of our economic problems could be solved quickly if poor people got more money.
Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 4th of May, 1978 Not answered: wait, Quincy’s Granny has to make regular payments to the undertaker? Is ‘the preacher, the doctor, lawyer and undertaker’ some traditional phrasing that I’m too young and white and suburban to recognize or should I infer that Granny has a shocking and possibly illicit hobby?
Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 28th features Gottfried Leibniz — missing his birthday by three days, incidentally — and speaks of the priority dispute about the invention of calculus. I’m not sure there is much serious questioning anymore about Leibniz’s contributions to mathematics. I think they might be even more strongly appreciated these days than they ever used to be, as people learn more about his work in computing machines and the attempt to automate calculation.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 28th is our soothing, familiar Andertoons for this essay. I remember in learning about equivalent forms of fractions wondering why anyone cared about reducing them. If two things have the same meaning, why do we need to go further? There are a couple answers. One is that it’s easier on us to understand a quantity if it’s a shorter, more familiar form. has a meaning that just does not. And another is that we often want to know whether two things are equivalent, or close. Is \frac{1147}{1517} more or less than ? Good luck eyeballing that.
And we learn, later on, that a lot of mathematics is about finding different ways to write the same thing. Each way has its uses. Sometimes a slightly more complicated way to write a thing makes proving something easier. There’s about two solids months of Real Analysis, for example, where you keep on writing that and this “adding zero” turns out to make proofs possible. Even easy.
Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City remains on my watch-with-caution list as the Math Camp story continues. But the strip from the 28th tickles me with the idea of crossing mathematics camp with Pinocchio‘s Pleasure Island. I’m imagining something where Heart starts laughing at something and ends up turning into something from Donald Duck’s Mathmagic land.
Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 1st of July is your traditional “mathematics is something hard” joke. I have the feeling it’s a rerun, but I lack the emotional investment in whether it is a rerun to check. The joke’s comfortable and familiar as it is, anyway.
![Aunt Fritzi: 'You two were supposed to be doing math practice, not playing cards.' Nancy, holding a fan of cards out and showing a geometric figure with several lines marked off: 'For your information, we were using these to measure angles.' [ Earlier ] Nancy and Sluggo look over the chart; the cards are spread out from a post-it note with a sketch of Aunt Frizi in it. It shows lines of sight. Nancy, in flashback: 'At this angle, she won't be able to see us playing cards.'](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/nancy_olivia-jaimes_8-may-2020.gif)
![Venn Diagram with two bubbles. The left is 'Day after Daylight Savings [sic] Start'; the right is 'Monday'. The intersection has an arrow from it pointing to a travel cup of coffee.](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/half-full_maria-scrivan_9-march-2020.gif)
is smaller than 
, although I’ve never seen it myself.
![[ When Einstein switched to something a lot easier. ] (He's standing in front of a blackboard full of sketches.) Einstein: '*Sigh* ... I give up. No matter how many ways I work it out, the squirrels still get to the bird feeders.](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/wiley-miller_non-sequitur_25-july-2018.gif)
has a meaning that 
just does not. And another is that we often want to know whether two things are equivalent, or close. Is \frac{1147}{1517} more or less than 
and this “adding zero” turns out to make proofs possible. Even easy.
nebusresearch 