## Reading the Comics, November 21, 2019: Computational Science Edition

There were just a handful of comic strips that mentioned mathematical topics I found substantial. Of those that did, computational science came up a couple times. So that’s how we got to here.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 17th has Joe writing an essay on the history of computing. It’s basically right, too, within the confines of space and understandable mistakes like replacing Pennsylvania with an easier-to-spell state. And within the confines of simplification for the sake of getting the idea across briefly. Most notable is Joe explaining ENIAC as “the first electronic digital computer”. Anyone calling anything “the first” of an invention is simplifying history, possibly to the point of misleading. But we must simplify any history to have it be understandable. ENIAC is among the first computers that anyone today would agree is of a kind with the laptop I use. And it’s certainly the one that, among its contemporaries, most captured the public imagination.

Incidentally, Heman Hollerith was born on Leap Day, 1860; this coming year will in that sense see only his 39th birthday.

Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics for the 18th is based on the question of whether P equals NP. This is, as T-Rex says, the greatest unsolved problem in computer science. These are what appear to be two different kinds of problems. Some of them we can solve in “polynomial time”, with the number of steps to find a solution growing as some polynomial function of the size of the problem. Others seem to be “non-polynomial”, meaning the number of steps to find a solution grows as … something not a polynomial.

You see one problem. Not knowing a way to solve a problem in polynomial time does not necessarily mean there isn’t a solution. It may mean we just haven’t thought of one. If there is a way we haven’t thought of, then we would say P equals NP. And many people assume that very exciting things would then follow. Part of this is because computational complexity researchers know that many NP problems are isomorphic to one another. That is, we can describe any of these problems as a translation of another of these problems. This is the other part which makes this joke: the declaration that ‘whether God likes poutine’ is isomorphic to the question ‘does P equal NP’.

We tend to assume, also, that if P does equal NP then NP problems, such as breaking public-key cryptography, are all suddenly easy. This isn’t necessarily guaranteed. When we describe something as polynomial or non-polynomial time we’re talking about the pattern by which the number of steps needed to find the solution grows. In that case, then, an algorithm that takes one million steps plus one billion times the size-of-the-problem to the one trillionth power is polynomial time. An algorithm that takes two raised to the size-of-the-problem divided by one quintillion (rounded up to the next whole number) is non-polynomial. But for most any problem you’d care to do, this non-polynomial algorithm will be done sooner. If it turns out P does equal NP, we still don’t necessarily know that NP problems are practical to solve.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s The Family Circus for the 20th has Dolly explaining to Jeff about the finiteness of the alphabet and infinity of numbers. I remember in my childhood coming to understand this and feeling something unjust in the difference between the kinds of symbols. That we can represent any of those whole numbers with just ten symbols (thirteen, if we include commas, decimals, and a multiplication symbol for the sake of using scientific notation) is an astounding feat of symbolic economy.

Zach Weinersmth’s Saturday Morning Breakfast cereal for the 21st builds on the statistics of genetics. In studying the correlations between one thing and another we look at something which varies, usually as the result of many factors, including some plain randomness. If there is a correlation between one variable and another we usually can describe how much of the change in one quantity depends on the other. This is what the scientist means on saying the presence of this one gene accounts for 0.1% of the variance in eeeeevil. The way this is presented, the activity of one gene is responsible for about one-thousandth of the level of eeeeevil in the person.

As the father observes, this doesn’t seem like much. This is because there are a lot of genes describing most traits. And that before we consider epigenetics, the factors besides what is in DNA that affect how an organism develops. I am, unfortunately, too ignorant of the language of genetics to be able to say what a typical variation for a single gene would be, and thus to check whether Weinersmith has the scale of numbers right.

This finishes the mathematically-themed comic strips from this past week. If all goes to my plan, Tuesday and Thursday will find the last of this year’s A-to-Z postings for this year. And Wednesday? I’ll try to think of something for Wednesday. It’d be a shame to just leave it hanging loose like it might.

## Reading the Comics, October 12, 2019: More Glances Edition

Today, I’m just listing the comics from last week that mentioned mathematics, but which didn’t raise a deep enough topic to be worth discussing. You know what a story problem looks like. I can’t keep adding to that.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 7th has Bob motivated to do arithmetic a little wrong.

Tony Carrillo’s F Minus for the 8th puts forth the idea that mathematics can be a superpower. Which, you know, it could be, given half a chance. According to a 1981 promotional comic book that Radio Shack carried, Superman’s brain is exactly as capable as a TRS-80 Color Computer. This was the pre-Crisis Superman, I feel like I should point out.

John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 9th has an appearance by $E = mc^2$.

Anthony Smith’s Learn to Speak Cat for the 9th is dubbed “Mathecatics” and uses a couple mathematical symbols to make a little cat cartoon.

Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 10th quotes René Descartes, billing him as a “French mathematician”. Which is true, but the quote is one about living properly. That’s more fairly a philosophical matter. Descartes has some reputation for his philosophical work, I understand.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s The Family Circus for the 11th drew quite a few merry comments in the snark-reading community since it’s a surprisingly wicked joke. It’s about Billy, Age 7, having trouble with an assignment that’s clearly arithmetic. So, enjoy.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 11th has the title character declare her disinterest in mathematics on the grounds she won’t use it.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 12th has the title character struggling with fractions.

And that’s the last of last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. I do plan to have the next Reading the Comics post on Sunday. Tomorrow should resume the Fall 2019 A-to-Z sequence with the letter ‘N’. And I am still open for topics for the next half-dozen essays. Please offer your thoughts; they’re all grand to receive. Thank you.

## Reading the Comics, September 24, 2019: I Make Something Of This Edition

I trust nobody’s too upset that I postponed the big Reading the Comics posts of this week a day. There’s enough comics from last week to split them into two essays. Please enjoy.

Scott Shaw! and Stan Sakai’s Popeye’s Cartoon Club for the 22nd is one of a yearlong series of Sunday strips, each by different cartoonists, celebrating the 90th year of Popeye’s existence as a character. And, I’m a Popeye fan from all the way back when Popeye was still a part of the pop culture. So that’s why I’m bringing such focus to a strip that, really, just mentions the existence of algebra teachers and that they might present a fearsome appearance to people.

Lincoln Pierce’s Big Nate for the 22nd has Nate seeking an omen for his mathematics test. This too seems marginal. But I can bring it back to mathematics. One of the fascinating things about having data is finding correlations between things. Sometimes we’ll find two things that seem to go together, including apparently disparate things like basketball success and test-taking scores. This can be an avenue for further research. One of these things might cause the other, or at least encourage it. Or the link may be spurious, both things caused by the same common factor. (Superstition can be one of those things: doing a thing ritually, in a competitive event, can help you perform better, even if you don’t believe in superstitions. Psychology is weird.)

But there are dangers too. Nate shows off here the danger of selecting the data set to give the result one wants. Even people with honest intentions can fall prey to this. Any real data set will have some points that just do not make sense, and look like a fluke or some error in data-gathering. Often the obvious nonsense can be safely disregarded, but you do need to think carefully to see that you are disregarding it for safe reasons. The other danger is that while two things do correlate, it’s all coincidence. Have enough pieces of data and sometimes they will seem to match up.

Norm Feuti’s Gil rerun for the 22nd has Gil practicing multiplication. It’s really about the difficulties of any kind of educational reform, especially in arithmetic. Gil’s mother is horrified by the appearance of this long multiplication. She dubs it both inefficient and harder than the way she learned. She doesn’t say the way she learned, but I’m guessing it’s the way that I learned too, which would have these problems done in three rows beneath the horizontal equals sign, with a bunch of little carry notes dotting above.

Gil’s Mother is horrified for bad reasons. Gil is doing exactly the same work that she was doing. The components of it are just written out differently. The only part of this that’s less “efficient” is that it fills out a little more paper. To me, who has no shortage of paper, this efficiency doens’t seem worth pursuing. I also like this way of writing things out, as it separates cleanly the partial products from the summations done with them. It also means that the carries from, say, multiplying the top number by the first digit of the lower can’t get in the way of carries from multiplying by the second digits. This seems likely to make it easier to avoid arithmetic errors, or to detect errors once suspected. I’d like to think that Gil’s Mom, having this pointed out, would drop her suspicions of this different way of writing things down. But people get very attached to the way they learned things, and will give that up only reluctantly. I include myself in this; there’s things I do for little better reason than inertia.

People will get hung up on the number of “steps” involved in a mathematical process. They shouldn’t. Whether, say, “37 x 2” is done in one step, two steps, or three steps is a matter of how you’re keeping the books. Even if we agree on how much computation is one step, we’re left with value judgements. Like, is it better to do many small steps, or few big steps? My own inclination is towards reliability. I’d rather take more steps than strictly necessary, if they can all be done more surely. If you want speed, my experience is, it’s better off aiming for reliability and consistency. Speed will follow from experience.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 22nd builds on mathematical physics. Lagrangian mechanics offers great, powerful tools for solving physics problems. It also offers a philosophically challenging interpretation of physics problems. Look at the space made up of all the possible configurations of the system. Take one point to represent the way the system starts. Take another point to represent the way the system ends. Grant that the system gets from that starting point to that ending point. How does it do that? What is the path in this configuration space that goes in-between this start and this end?

We can find the path by using the Lagrangian. Particularly, integrate the Lagrangian over every possible curve that connects the starting point and the ending point. This is every possible way to match start and end. The path that the system actually follows will be an extremum. The actual path will be one that minimizes (or maximizes) this integral, compared to all the other paths nearby that it might follow. Yes, that’s bizarre. How would the particle even know about those other paths?

This seems bad enough. But we can ignore the problem in classical mechanics. The extremum turns out to always match the path that we’d get from taking derivatives of the Lagrangian. Those derivatives look like calculating forces and stuff, like normal.

Then in quantum mechanics the problem reappears and we can’t just ignore it. In the quantum mechanics view no particle follows “a” “path”. It instead is found more likely in some configurations than in others. The most likely configurations correspond to extreme values of this integral. But we can’t just pretend that only the best-possible path “exists”.

Thus the strip’s point. We can represent mechanics quite well. We do this by pretending there are designated starting and ending conditions. And pretending that the system selects the best of every imaginable alternative. The incautious pop physics writer, eager to find exciting stuff about quantum mechanics, will describe this as a particle “exploring” or “considering” all its options before “selecting” one. This is true in the same way that we can say a weight “wants” to roll down the hill, or two magnets “try” to match north and south poles together. We should not mistake it for thinking that electrons go out planning their days, though. Newtonian mechanics gets us used to the idea that if we knew the positions and momentums and forces between everything in the universe perfectly well, we could forecast the future and retrodict the past perfectly. Lagrangian mechanics seems to invite us to imagine a world where everything “perceives” its future and all its possible options. It would be amazing if this did not capture our imaginations.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus for the 24th has young Billy amazed by the prospect of algebra, of doing mathematics with both numbers and letters. I’m assuming Billy’s awestruck by the idea of letters representing numbers. Geometry also uses quite a few letters, mostly as labels for the parts of shapes. But that seems like a less fascinating use of letters.

The second half of last week’s comics I hope to post here on Wednesday. Stick around and we’ll see how close I come to making it. Thank you.

## Reading the Comics, April 2018: Another Normal Week Edition

And for another week running the pace of mathematically-themed comic strips has been near normal. There’s nowhere near enough to split the essay into two pieces, which is fine. There is some more work involved in including images for all the strips I discuss and this pace better fits the time I could make for writing this week. Will admit I’m scared of what’s going to happen when I have a busy week and Comic Strip Master Command orders more comics for me. I admit this isn’t an inspired name for the Edition. But the edition names are mostly there so people have a chance of telling whether they’ve read an installment before. The date alone doesn’t do it. A couple of words will. Maybe I should give up on meaningful names if there isn’t an obvious theme for the week. It’s got to be at least as good to name something “Coronet Blue Edition” as to name it “Lots Of Andertoons Edition”.

Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows rerun for the 1st riffs on quantum computers. You’ve maybe seen much talk about them in pop science columns and blogs. They require a bunch of stuff that gets talked about as if it were magical. Quantum mechanics, obviously, the biggest bit of magic in popular science today. Complex-valued numbers, which make for much more convenient mathematical descriptions. Probability, which everyone thinks they understand and which it turns out nobody does. Vector spaces and linear algebra, which mathematics (and physics) majors get to know well. The mathematics of how a quantum computer computes is well-described as this sort of matrix and vector work. Quantum computing promises to be a really good way to do problems where the best available approach is grinding it out: testing every possibility and finding the best ones. No part of making a quantum computer is easy, though, so it’s hard to say when we’ll have the computing power to make a version of SimCity with naturally curving roads. (This is a new tag for my Reading the Comics essays, but I’ve surely featured the strip some before.)

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 2nd is a mathematics-education-these-days joke. The extremely small child talking about counting-without-a-calculator as a subject worth studying. People are always complaining that people don’t do arithmetic well enough in their heads. I understand the frustration, considering last week I stymied a cashier at a Penn Station by giving \$22.11 for my \$11.61 order. I don’t know why he put in my payment as \$20; why not let the machine designed to do this work, do the work? He did fine working out that I should get \$10 in bills back but muddled up the change. As annoyances go it ranks up there with the fast food cashier asking my name for the order and entering it as “Joeseph”.

Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 4th mentions the Möbius Strip. It’s got to be the most famous exotic piece of geometry to have penetrated the popular culture. It’s also a good shape to introduce geometry students to a “non-orientable” surface. Non-orientable means about what you’d imagine. There’s not a way to put coordinates on it that don’t get weird. For example, try drawing an equator on the surface of the strip. Any curve along the surface that doesn’t run off the edges will do. The curve just has to meet itself. It looks like this divides the strip into two pieces. Fine, then; which of these two pieces is “north” and which is “south” of this equator? There’s not a way to do that. You get surprising results if you try.

Karen Montague-Reyes’s Clear Blue Water rerun for the 5th has Eve deploying a mathematical formula. She’s trying to describe the way that perception of time changes over the course of events. It’s not a bad goal. Many things turn out to be mathematically describable. I don’t see what the equation is supposed to even mean, but then, I haven’t seen the model she developed that implies this equation. (This is not a new tag and I’m surprised by that.)

Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 6th is some mathematics wordplay, built on the abacus. I’m not sure there’s more to say about this, past that you can do much more on an abacus. You can, at least. I keep reading directions about how to multiply with it and then I look at mine and I feel helpless.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus for the 7th is a kids-mispronouncing-a-mathematics-word strip. I have even less to say about this. It’s a normal week.

## Reading the Comics, April 22, 2017: Thought There’d Be Some More Last Week Edition

Allison Barrows’s PreTeena rerun for the 18th is a classic syllogism put into the comic strip’s terms. The thing about these sorts of deductive-logic syllogisms is that whether the argument is valid depends only on the shape of the argument. It has nothing to do with whether the thing being discussed makes any sense. This can be disorienting. It’s hard to ignore the everyday meaning of words when you hear a string of sentences. But it’s also hard to parse a string of sentences if the words don’t make sense in them. This is probably part of why on the mathematics side of things logic courses will skimp on syllogisms, using them to give an antique flavor and sense of style to the introduction of courses. It’s easier to use symbolic representations for logic instead.

Randy Glasbergen’s Glasbergen Cartoons rerun for the 20th is the old joke about arithmetic being different between school, government, and corporate work. I haven’t looked at the comments — the GoComics redesign, whatever else it does, makes it very easy to skip the comments — but I’m guessing by the second one someone’s said the Common Core method means getting the most wrong answer.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus for the 21st I don’t know is a rerun. But a lot of them are these days. Anyway, it looks like a silly joke about how nice mathematics would be without numbers; Dolly has no idea. I can sympathize with being intimidated by numerals. At the risk of being all New Math-y, I wonder if she wouldn’t like arithmetic more if it were presented as a game. Like, here’s a couple symbols — let’s say * and | for a start, and then some rules. * and * makes *, but * and | makes |. Also | and * makes |. But | and | makes |*. And so on. This is binary arithmetic, disguised, but I wonder if making it look like something inconsequential would make it more pleasant to learn, and if that would transfer over to arithmetic with 1’s and 0’s. Normal, useful arithmetic would be harder to play like this. You’d need ten symbols that are easy to write that aren’t already numbers, letters, or common symbols. But I wonder if it’d be worth it.

Tom Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 22nd is provided for mathematics teachers who need something to tape to their door. You’re welcome.

## Reading the Comics, April 6, 2017: Abbreviated Week Edition

I’m writing this a little bit early because I’m not able to include the Saturday strips in the roundup. There won’t be enough to make a split week edition; I’ll just add the Saturday strips to next week’s report. In the meanwhile:

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute for the 2nd is a magic trick, as the name suggests. It figures out a card by way of shuffling a (partial) deck and getting three (honest) answers from the other participant. If I’m not counting wrongly, you could do this trick with up to 27 cards and still get the right card after three answers. I feel like there should be a way to explain this that’s grounded in information theory, but I’m not able to put that together. I leave the suggestion here for people who see the obvious before I get to it.

Bil Keane and Jeff Keane’s Family Circus (probable) rerun for the 6th reassured me that this was not going to be a single-strip week. And a dubiously included single strip at that. I’m not sure that lotteries are the best use of the knowledge of numbers, but they’re a practical use anyway.

Bill Bettwy’s Take It From The Tinkersons for the 6th is part of the universe of students resisting class. I can understand the motivation problem in caring about numbers of apples that satisfy some condition. In the role of distinct objects whose number can be counted or deduced cards are as good as apples. In the role of things to gamble on, cards open up a lot of probability questions. Counting cards is even about how the probability of future events changes as information about the system changes. There’s a lot worth learning there. I wouldn’t try teaching it to elementary school students.

Jeffrey Caulfield and Alexandre Rouillard’s Mustard and Boloney for the 6th uses mathematics as the stuff know-it-alls know. At least I suppose it is; Doctor Know It All speaks of “the pathagorean principle”. I’m assuming that’s meant to be the Pythagorean theorem, although the talk about “in any right triangle the area … ” skews things. You can get to stuf about areas of triangles from the Pythagorean theorem. One of the shorter proofs of it depends on the areas of the squares of the three sides of a right triangle. But it’s not what people typically think of right away. But he wouldn’t be the first know-it-all to start blathering on the assumption that people aren’t really listening. It’s common enough to suppose someone who speaks confidently and at length must know something.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 6th is a welcome return to anthropomorphic-numerals humor. Been a while.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 6th builds on the form of a classic puzzle, about a sequence indexed to the squares of a chessboard. The story being riffed on is a bit of mathematical legend. The King offered the inventor of chess any reward. The inventor asked for one grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second square, four grains for the third square, eight grains for the fourth square, and so on, through all 64 squares. An extravagant reward, but surely one within the king’s power to grant, right? And of course not: by the 64th doubling the amount of wheat involved is so enormous it’s impossibly great wealth.

The father’s offer is meant to evoke that. But he phrases it in a deceptive way, “one penny for the first square, two for the second, and so on”. That “and so on” is the key. Listing a sequence and ending “and so on” is incomplete. The sequence can go in absolutely any direction after the given examples and not be inconsistent. There is no way to pick a single extrapolation as the only logical choice.

We do it anyway, though. Even mathematicians say “and so on”. This is because we usually stick to a couple popular extrapolations. We suppose things follow a couple common patterns. They’re polynomials. Or they’re exponentials. Or they’re sine waves. If they’re polynomials, they’re lower-order polynomials. Things like that. Most of the time we’re not trying to trick our fellow mathematicians. Or we know we’re modeling things with some physical base and we have reason to expect some particular type of function.

In this case, the \$1.27 total is consistent with getting two cents for every chess square after the first. There are infinitely many other patterns that would work, and the kid would have been wise to ask for what precisely “and so on” meant before choosing.

Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County 2017 for the 7th is the climax of a little story in which Oliver Wendell Holmes has been annoying people by shoving scientific explanations of things into their otherwise pleasant days. It’s a habit some scientifically-minded folks have, and it’s an annoying one. Many of us outgrow it. Anyway, this strip is about the curious evidence suggesting that the universe is not just expanding, but accelerating its expansion. There are mathematical models which allow this to happen. When developing General Relativity, Albert Einstein included a Cosmological Constant for little reason besides that without it, his model would suggest the universe was of a finite age and had expanded from an infinitesimally small origin. He had grown up without anyone knowing of any evidence that the size of the universe was a thing that could change.

Anyway, the Cosmological Constant is a puzzle. We can find values that seem to match what we observe, but we don’t know of a good reason it should be there. We sciencey types like to have models that match data, but we appreciate more knowing why the models look like that and not anything else. So it’s a good problem some of the cosmologists have been working on. But we’ve been here before. A great deal of physics, especially in the 20th Century, has been driven by looking for reasons behind what look like arbitrary points in a successful model. If Oliver were better-versed in the history of science — something scientifically minded people are often weak on, myself included — he’d be less easily taunted by Opus.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler’s TruthFacts for the 7th thinks that we forgot they ran this same strip back on the 17th of March. I spotted it, though. Nyah.