I am not my state’s pinball champion, although for the first time I did make it through the first round of play. What is important about this is that between that and a work trip I needed time for things which were not mathematics this past week. So my first piece this week will be a partial listing of comic strips that, last week, mentioned mathematics but not in a way I could build an essay around. … It’s not going to be a week with long essays, either, though. Here’s a start, though.
Henry Scarpelli’s Archie rerun for the 12th of January was about Moose’s sudden understanding of algebra, and wish for it to be handy. Well, every mathematician knows the moment when suddenly something makes sense, maybe even feels inevitably true. And then we do go looking for excuses to show it off.
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 13th has Meggs fail a probability quiz, an outcome his teacher claims is almost impossible. If the test were multiple-choice (including true-or-false) it is possible to calculate the probability of a person making wild guesses getting every answer wrong (or right) and it usually is quite the feat, at least if the test is of appreciable length. For more open answers it’s harder to say what the chance of someone getting the question right, or wrong, is. And then there’s the strange middle world of partial credit.
My love does give multiple-choice quizzes occasionally and it is always a source of wonder when a student does worse than blind chance would. Everyone who teaches has seen that, though.
Ed Allison’s Unstrange Phenomenon for the 13th plays with optical illusions, which include several based on geometric tricks. Humans have some abilities at estimating relative areas and distances and lengths. But they’re not, like, smart abilities. They can be fooled, basically because their settings are circumstances where there’s no evolutionary penalty for being fooled this way. So we can go on letting the presence of arrow pointers mislead us about the precise lengths of lines, and that’s all right. There are, like, eight billion cognitive tricks going on all around us and most of them are much more disturbing.
As will sometimes happen it’s inconvenient for met to write up a paragraph or two on the particularly mathematically significant comic strips of the past week. Let me here share the comics that just mentioned mathematics, then, and save the heavy stuff for a bit later on.
Jeffrey Caulfield and Alexandre Rouillard’s Mustard and Boloney for the 7th uses a knowledge of mathematics as shorthand for general knowledge. The strip does misspell “Pythagorean”. This could be a slip on the cartoonists’ part that got past their editors too. Or it could be an extra joke on how often the know-it-all, really, does not. He’ll just talk a confident game long after everyone else has stopped really listening. (I’m a recovering know-it-all myself. I know how our kind thinks.) Or it might be trolling know-it-alls into correcting them.
And this covers things through to Friday’s comics. I write this not having had the chance to read Saturday’s yet. When I do, and when I have the whole week’s strips to discuss, I’ll have it at this link. Furthermore, this week sees the last quarter of the Fall 2019 A to Z under way. I’m excited to learn what I’m doing for the letter ‘U’ also.
There were a decent number of mathematically-themed comic strips this past week. This figures, because I’ve spent this past week doing a lot of things, and look to be busier this coming week. Nothing to do but jump into it, then.
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 21st is your usual strip about the student resisting the story problem. Story problems are hard to set. Ideally, they present problems like mathematicians actually do, proposing the finding of something it would be interesting to learn. But it’s hard to find different problems like this. You might be fairly interested in how long it takes a tub filling with water to overflow, but the third problem of this kind is going to look a lot like the first two. And it’s also hard to find problems that allow for no confounding alternate interpretations, like this. Have some sympathy and let us sometimes just give you an equation to solve.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 21st is a pun built on two technical definitions for “induction”. The one used in mathematics, and logic, is a powerful tool for certain kinds of proof. It’s hard to teach how to set it up correctly, though. It’s a way to prove an infinitely large number of logical propositions, though. Let me call those propositions P1, P2, P3, P4, and so on. Pj for every counting number j. The first step of the proof is showing that some base proposition is true. This is usually some case that’s really easy to do. This is the fun part of a proof by induction, because it feels like you’ve done half the work and it amounts to something like, oh, showing that 1 is a triangular number.
The second part is hard. You have to show that whenever Pj is true, this implies that Pj + 1 is also true. This is usually a step full of letters representing numbers rather than anything you can directly visualize with, like, dots on paper. This is usually the hard part. But put those two halves together? And you’ve proven that all your propositions are true. Making things line up like that is so much fun.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 22nd is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. It’s again your student trying to get out of not really knowing mathematics in class. Longtime readers will know, though, that I’m fond of rough drafts in mathematics. I think most mathematicians are. If you are doing something you don’t quite understand, then you don’t know how to do it well. It’s worth, in that case, doing an approximation of what you truly want to do. This is for the same reason writers are always advised to write something and then edit later. The rough draft will help you find what you truly want. In thinking about the rough draft, you can get closer to the good draft.
Stephen Bentley’s Herb and Jamaal for the 22nd is one lost on me. I grew up when Schoolhouse Rock was a fun and impossible-to-avoid part of watching Saturday Morning cartoons. So there’s a lot of simple mathematics that I learned by having it put to music and played often.
Still, it’s surprising Herb can’t think of why it might be easier to remember something that’s fun, that’s put to a memory-enhancing tool like music, and repeated often, than it is to remember whether 8 times 7 is 54. Arithmetic gets easier to remember when you notice patterns, and find them delightful. Even fun. It’s a lot like everything else humans put any attention to, that way.
This past week included one of those odd days that’s so busy I get a column’s worth of topics from a single day’s reading. And there was another strip (the Cow and Boy rerun) which I might have roped in had the rest of the week been dead. The Motley rerun might have made the cut too, for a reference to .
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 5th is a joke about resisting the story problem. I’m surprised by the particulars of this question. Turning an arithmetic problem into counts of some number of particular things is common enough and has a respectable history. But slices of broccoli quiche? I’m distracted by the choice, and I like quiche. It’s a weird thing for a kid to have, and a weird amount for anybody to have.
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 5th of November, 2018. I’m of the age cohort to remember Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche being a book people had for some reason. Also not understanding why “real men” would not eat quiche. If you named the same dish “Cheddar Bacon Pie” you’d have men lined up for a quarter-mile to get it. Anyway, it took me too long to work out but I think the teacher’s name is Mr Crackett? Cast lists, cartoonists. We need cast lists on your comic’s About pages.
JC Duffy’s Lug Nuts for the 5th uses mathematics as a shorthand for intelligence. And it particularly uses π as shorthand for mathematics. There’s a lot of compressed concepts put into this. I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s rerun come mid-March.
Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am for the 5th I’ve highlighted before. It’s the pie chart joke. It will never stop amusing me, but I suppose I should take Randolph Itch, 2 am out of my rotation of comics I read to include here.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 5th is a logic puzzle joke. And a set theory joke. Dad is trying to argue he can’t be surprised by his gift because it’ll belong to one of two sets of things. And he receives nothing. This ought to defy his expectations, if we think of “nothing” as being “the empty set”. The empty set is an indispensable part of set theory. It’s a set that has no elements, has nothing in it. Then suppose we talk about what it means for one set to be contained in another. Take what seems like an uncontroversial definition: set A is contained in set B if there’s nothing in A which is not also in B. Then the empty set is contained inside every set. So Dad, having supposed that he can’t be surprised, since he’d receive either something that is “socks” or something that is “not-socks”, does get surprised. He gets the one thing that is both “socks” and “not-socks” simultaneously.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 5th of November, 2018. I may have mentioned. So my partner in Modern Physics Lab one time figured to organize his dorm room by sorting everything in it into two piles, “pair of socks” and “not a pair of socks”. I asked him how he’d classify two socks that, while mismatched, were bundled together. He informed me that he hated me.
I hate to pull this move a third time in one week (see here and here), but the logic of the joke doesn’t work for me. I’ll go along with “nothing” as being “the empty set” for these purposes. And I’ll accept that “nothing” is definitely “not-socks”. But to say that “nothing” is also “socks” is … weird, unless you are putting it in the language of set theory. I think the joke would be saved if it were more clearly established that Dad should be expecting some definite thing, so that no-thing would defy all expectations.
“Nothing” is a difficult subject to treat logically. I have been exposed a bit to the thinking of professional philosophers on the subject. Not enough that I feel I could say something non-stupid about the subject. But enough to say that yeah, they’re right, we have a really hard time describing “nothing”. The null set is better behaved. I suppose that’s because logicians have been able to tame it and give it some clearly defined properties.
Mike Shiell’s The Wandering Melon for the 5th of November, 2018. I am curious whether this is meant to be the same lottery winner who in August got struck by lightning. It would make the torn, singed check make more direct sense. But what are the odds someone wins the lottery, gets hit by lightning, and then eaten by a crocodile? … Ah well, at least nothing worse is going to happen to him.
Mike Shiell’s The Wandering Melon for the 5th felt like a rerun to me. It wasn’t. But Shiell did do a variation on this joke in August. Both are built on the same whimsy of probability. It’s unlikely one will win a lottery. It’s unlikely one will die in a particular and bizarre way. What are the odds someone would have both things happen to them?
So I’m going to have a third Reading the Comics essay for last week’s strips. This happens sometimes. Two of the four strips for this essay mention percentages. But one of the others is so important to me that it gets naming rights for the essay. You’ll understand when I’m done. I hope.
Angie Bailey’s Texts From Mittens for the 2nd talks about percentages. That’s a corner of arithmetic that many people find frightening and unwelcoming. I’m tickled that Mittens doesn’t understand how easy it is to work out a percentage of 100. It’s a good, reasonable bit of characterization for a cat.
John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for the 2nd is about a subject close to my heart. At least a third of it is. The mention of negative Kelvin temperatures set off a … heated … debate on the comments thread at GoComics.com. Quite a few people remember learning in school that the Kelvin temperature scale. It starts with the coldest possible temperature, which is zero. And that’s that. They have taken this to denounce Graziano as writing obvious nonsense. Well.
Something you should know about anything you learned in school: the reality is more complicated than that. This is true for thermodynamics. This is true for mathematics. This is true for anything interesting enough for humans to study. This also applies to stuff you learned as an undergraduate. Also to grad school.
John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for the 2nd of August, 2018. … Why did the Madrid police train a dog to demonstrate CPR? I mean, it’s cute, and I guess it gets some publicity for emergency-health-care techniques but is it useful? For the time and effort invested? It seems peculiar to me.
So what are negative temperatures? At least on an absolute temperature scale, where the answer isn’t an obvious and boring “cold”? One clue is in the word “absolute” there. It means a way of measuring temperature that’s in some way independent of how we do the measurement. In ordinary life we measure temperatures with physical phenomena. Fluids that expand or contract as their temperature changes. Metals that expand or contract as their temperatures change. For special cases like blast furnaces, sample slugs of clays that harden or don’t at temperature. Observing the radiation of light off a thing. And these are all fine, useful in their domains. They’re also bound in particular physical experiments, though. Is there a definition of temperature that … you know … we can do mathematically?
Of course, or I wouldn’t be writing this. There are two mathematical-physics components to give us temperature. One is the internal energy of your system. This is the energy of whatever your thing is, less the gravitational or potential energy that reflects where it happens to be sitting. Also minus the kinetic energy that comes of the whole system moving in whatever way you like. That is, the energy you’d see if that thing were in an otherwise empty universe. The second part is — OK, this will confuse people. It’s the entropy. Which is not a word for “stuff gets broken”. Not in this context. The entropy of a system describes how many distinct ways there are for a system to arrange its energy. Low-entropy systems have only a few ways to put things. High-entropy systems have a lot of ways to put things. This does harmonize with the pop-culture idea of entropy. There are many ways for a room to be messy. There are few ways for it to be clean. And it’s so easy to make a room messier and hard to make it tidier. We say entropy tends to increase.
So. A mathematical physicist bases “temperature” on the internal energy and the entropy. Imagine giving a system a tiny bit more energy. How many more ways would the system be able to arrange itself with that extra energy? That gives us the temperature. (To be precise, it gives us the reciprocal of the temperature. We could set this up as how a small change in entropy affects the internal energy, and get temperature right away. But I have an easier time thinking of going from change-in-energy to change-in-entropy than the other way around. And this is my blog so I get to choose how I set things up.)
This definition sounds bizarre. But it works brilliantly. It’s all nice clean mathematics. It matches perfectly nice easy-to-work-out cases, too. Like, you may kind of remember from high school physics how the temperature of a gas is something something average kinetic energy something. Work out the entropy and the internal energy of an ideal gas. Guess what this change-in-entropy/change-in-internal-energy thing gives you? Exactly something something average kinetic energy something. It’s brilliant.
In ordinary stuff, adding a little more internal energy to a system opens up new ways to arrange that energy. It always increases the entropy. So the absolute temperature, from this definition, is always positive. Good stuff. Matches our intuition well.
So in 1956 Dr Norman Ramsey and Dr Martin Klein published some interesting papers in the Physical Review. (Here’s a link to Ramsey’s paper and here’s Klein’s, if you can get someone else to pay for your access.) Their insightful question: what happens if a physical system has a maximum internal energy? If there’s some way of arranging the things in your system so that no more energy can come in? What if you’re close to but not at that maximum?
It depends on details, yes. But consider this setup: there’s one, or only a handful, of ways to arrange the maximum possible internal energy. There’s some more ways to arrange nearly-the-maximum-possible internal energy. There’s even more ways to arrange not-quite-nearly-the-maximum-possible internal energy.
Look at what that implies, though. If you’re near the maximum-possible internal energy, then adding a tiny bit of energy reduces the entropy. There’s fewer ways to arrange that greater bit of energy. Greater internal energy, reduced entropy. This implies the temperature is negative.
So we have to allow the idea of negative temperatures. Or we have to throw out this statistical-mechanics-based definition of temperature. And the definition works so well otherwise. Nobody’s got an idea nearly as good for it. So mathematical physicists shrugged, and noted this as a possibility, but mostly ignored it for decades. If it got mentioned, it was because the instructor was showing off a neat weird thing. This is how I encountered it, as a young physics major full of confidence and not at all good on wedge products. But it was sitting right there, in my textbook, Kittel and Kroemer’s Thermal Physics. Appendix E, four brisk pages before the index. Still, it was an enchanting piece.
And a useful one, possibly the most useful four-page aside I encountered as an undergraduate. My thesis research simulated a fluid-equilibrium problem run at different temperatures. There was a natural way that this fluid would have a maximum possible internal energy. So, a good part — the most fascinating part — of my research was in the world of negative temperatures. It’s a strange one, one where entropy seems to work in reverse. Things build, spontaneously. More heat, more energy, makes them build faster. In simulation, a shell of viscosity-free gas turned into what looked for all the world like a solid shell.
All right, but you can simulate anything on a computer, or in equations, as I did. Would this ever happen in reality? … And yes, in some ways. Internal energy and entropy are ideas that have natural, irresistible fits in information theory. This is the study of … information. I mean, how you send a signal and how you receive a signal. It turns out a lot of laser physics has, in information theory terms, behavior that’s negative-temperature. And, all right, but that’s not what anybody thinks of as temperature.
Well, these ideas happen still. They usually need some kind of special constraint on the things. Atoms held in a magnetic field so that their motions are constrained. Vortices locked into place on a two-dimensional surface (a prerequisite to my little fluids problems). Atoms bound into a lattice that keeps them from being able to fly free. All weird stuff, yes. But all exactly as the statistical-mechanics temperature idea calls on.
And notice. These negative temperatures happen only when the energy is extremely high. This is the grounds for saying that they’re hotter than positive temperatures. And good reason, too. Getting into what heat is, as opposed to temperature, is an even longer discussion. But it seems fair to say something with a huge internal energy has more heat than something with slight internal energy. So Graziano’s Ripley’s claim is right.
(GoComics.com commenters, struggling valiantly, have tried to talk about quantum mechanics stuff and made a hash of it. As a general rule, skip any pop-physics explanation of something being quantum mechanics.)
If you’re interested in more about this, I recommend Stephen J Blundell and Katherine M Blundell’s Concepts in Thermal Physics. Even if you’re not comfortable enough in calculus to follow the derivations, the textbook prose is insightful.
John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 3rd is a probability joke. And it’s built on how impossible putting together a particular huge complicated structure can be. I admit I’m not sure how I’d go about calculating the chance of a heap of Legos producing a giraffe shape. Imagine working out the number of ways Legos might fall together. Imagine working out how many of those could be called giraffe shapes. It seems too great a workload. And figuring it by experiment, shuffling Legos until a giraffe pops out, doesn’t seem much better.
This approaches an argument sometimes raised about the origins of life. Grant there’s no chance that a pile of Legos could be dropped together to make a giraffe shape. How can the much bigger pile of chemical elements have been stirred together to make an actual giraffe? Or, the same problem in another guise. If a monkey could go at a typewriter forever without typing any of Shakespeare’s plays, how did a chain of monkeys get to writing all of them?
And there’s a couple of explanations. At least partial explanations. There is much we don’t understand about the origins of life. But one is that the universe is huge. There’s lots of stars. It looks like most stars have planets. There’s lots of chances for chemicals to mix together and form a biochemistry. Even an impossibly unlikely thing will happen, given enough chances.
And another part is selection. A pile of Legos thrown into a pile can do pretty much anything. Any piece will fit into any other piece in a variety of ways. A pile of chemicals are more constrained in what they can do. Hydrogen, oxygen, and a bit of activation energy can make hydrogen-plus-hydroxide ions, water, or hydrogen peroxide, and that’s it. There can be a lot of ways to arrange things. Proteins are chains of amino acids. These chains can be about as long as you like. (It seems.) (I suppose there must be some limit.) And they curl over and fold up in some of the most complicated mathematical problems anyone can even imagine doing. How hard is it to find a set of chemicals that are a biochemistry? … That’s hard to say. There are about twenty amino acids used for proteins in our life. It seems like there could be a plausible life with eighteen amino acids, or 24, including a couple we don’t use here. It seems plausible, though, that my father could have had two brothers growing up; if there were, would I exist?
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 3rd of August, 2018. This doesn’t relate to the particular comic any. Wikipedia says that in January 2017 they launched a special version of the strip, designed for people to read on mobile phones, where the panels progress vertically so you just scroll down to read them. This tickles the part of me that was fascinated how pre-Leap-Day-1988 Peanuts strips could be arranged as one row of four panels, two rows of two panels, or four rows of one panel to fit a newspaper’s needs. I’m not mocking the idea. I’d love it if comic strips could be usefully read on mobile devices. I can’t imagine my Reading the Comics workflow working with one, though.
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 3rd is a story-problem joke. Familiar old form to one. The question seems to be a bit mangled in the asking, though. Thirty percent of Jonson’s twelve apples is a nasty fractional number of apples. Surely the question should have given Jonson ten and Fitzclown twelve apples. Then thirty percent of Jonson’s apples would be a nice whole number.
I talk about mathematics themes in comic strips often, and those essays are gathered at this link. You might enjoy more of them. If Texts From Mittens gets on-topic for me again I’ll have an essay about it at this link.. (It’s a new tag, and a new comic, at least at GoComics.com.) Other discussions of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not strips are at this link and probably aren’t all mentions of Rubik’s Cubes. The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee appears in essays at this link. And other appearances of Ginger Meggsare at this link. And so yeah, that one Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where they say the surface temperature is like negative 300 degrees Celsius, and therefore below absolute zero? I’m willing to write that off as it’s an incredibly high-energy atmosphere that’s fallen into negative (absolute) temperatures. Makes the place more exotic and weird. They need more of that.
I hate to disillusion anyone but I lack hard rules about what qualifies as a mathematically-themed comic strip. During a slow week, more marginal stuff makes it. This past week was going slow enough that I tagged Wednesday’s Quincy rerun, from March of 1979 for possible inclusion. And all it does is mention that Quincy’s got a mathematics test due. Fortunately for me the week picked up a little. It cheats me of an excuse to point out Ted Shearer’s art style to people, but that’s not really my blog’s business.
Also it may not surprise you but since I’ve decided I need to include GoComics images I’ve gotten more restrictive. Somehow the bit of work it takes to think of a caption and to describe the text and images of a comic strip feel like that much extra work.
Roy Schneider’s The Humble Stumble for the 13th of May is a logic/geometry puzzle. Is it relevant enough for here? Well, I spent some time working it out. And some time wondering about implicit instructions. Like, if the challenge is to have exactly four equally-sized boxes after two toothpicks are moved, can we have extra stuff? Can we put a toothpick where it’s just a stray edge, part of no particular shape? I can’t speak to how long you stay interested in this sort of puzzle. But you can have some good fun rules-lawyering it.
Jeff Harris’s Shortcuts for the 13th is a children’s informational feature about Aristotle. Aristotle is renowned for his mathematical accomplishments by many people who’ve got him mixed up with Archimedes. Aristotle it’s harder to say much about. He did write great texts that pop-science writers credit as giving us the great ideas about nature and physics and chemistry that the Enlightenment was able to correct in only about 175 years of trying. His mathematics is harder to summarize though. We can say certainly that he knew some mathematics. And that he encouraged thinking of subjects as built on logical deductions from axioms and definitions. So there is that influence.
Jeff Harris’s Shortcuts for the 13th of May, 2018. That demonstration of Aristotle’s syllogisms is the same one I see when I search DuckDuckGo for ‘aristotle mathematics’ so it must come right from his texts that I’ve never read! That’s how citations work, right?
Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 15th is a pun, built on the bell curve. This is also known as the Gaussian distribution or the normal distribution. It turns up everywhere. If you plot how likely a particular value is to turn up, you get a shape that looks like a slightly melted bell. In principle the bell curve stretches out infinitely far. In practice, the curve turns into a horizontal line so close to zero you can’t see the difference once you’re not-too-far away from the peak.
Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 15th of May, 2018. I am curious whether there’s any significance to Thompson’s uniforms, particularly the player having a ‘B’ camp and a ‘U’ shoulder patch. I don’t think there’s an obvious relevance to the statistics jokes being made.
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 16th I assume takes place in a mathematics class. I’m assuming the question is adding together four two-digit numbers. But “what are 26, 24, 33, and 32” seems like it should be open to other interpretations. Perhaps Mr Canehard was asking for some class of numbers those all fit into. Integers, obviously. Counting numbers. Compound numbers rather than primes. I keep wanting to say there’s something deeper, like they’re all multiples of three (or something) but they aren’t. They haven’t got any factors other than 1 in common. I mention this because I’d love to figure out what interesting commonality those numbers have and which I’m overlooking.
Ed Stein’s Freshly Squeezed for the 17th is a story problem strip. Bit of a passive-aggressive one, in-universe. But I understand why it would be formed like that. The problem’s incomplete, as stated. There could be some fun in figuring out what extra bits of information one would need to give an answer. This is another new-tagged comic.
Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 19th name-drops calculus, credibly, as something high schoolers would be amazed to see one of their own do in their heads. There’s not anything on the blackboard that’s iconically calculus, it happens. Dilton’s writing out a polynomial, more or less, and that’s a fit subject for high school calculus. They’re good examples on which to learn differentiation and integration. They’re a little more complicated than straight lines, but not too weird or abstract. And they follow nice, easy-to-summarize rules. But they turn up in high school algebra too, and can fit into geometry easily. Or any subject, really, as remember, everything is polynomials.
Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie rerun for the 19th of May, 2018. And yeah, C^2 + x + 1) isn’t really a coherent expression. It’s either missing a ( mark or, if the C is the open-parentheses, then it’s got nothing-in-particular squared. Also I am so bothered to have close-parentheses and open-parentheses out of order that last sentence. You have no idea.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 19th is Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. Glad that it’s there. Let me explain why it is proper construction of a joke that a Fibonacci Division might be represented with a spiral. Fibonacci’s the name we give to Leonardo of Pisa, who lived in the first half of the 13th century. He’s most important for explaining to the western world why these Hindu-Arabic numerals were worth learning. But his pop-cultural presence owes to the Fibonacci Sequence, the sequence of numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on. Each number’s the sum of the two before it. And this connects to the Golden Ratio, one of pop mathematics’ most popular humbugs. As the terms get bigger and bigger, the ratio between a term and the one before it gets really close to the Golden Ratio, a bit over 1.618.
So. Draw a quarter-circle that connects the opposite corners of a 1×1 square. Connect that to a quarter-circle that connects opposite corners of a 2×2 square. Connect that to a quarter-circle connecting opposite corners of a 3×3 square. And a 5×5 square, and an 8×8 square, and a 13×13 square, and a 21×21 square, and so on. Yes, there are ambiguities in the way I’ve described this. I’ve tried explaining how to do things just right. It makes a heap of boring words and I’m trying to reduce how many of those I write. But if you do it the way I want, guess what shape you have?
And that is why this is a correctly-formed joke about the Fibonacci Division.
And this should clear out last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. I didn’t realize just how busy last week had been until I looked at what I thought was a backlog of just two days’ worth of strips and it turned out to be about two thousand comics. I exaggerate, but as ever, not by much. This current week seems to be a more relaxed pace. So I’ll have to think of something to write for the Tuesday and Thursday slots. Hm. (I’ll be all right. I’ve got one thing I need to stop bluffing about and write, and there’s usually a fair roundup of interesting tweets or articles I’ve seen that I can write. Those are often the most popular articles around here.)
Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes with Orange for the 1st of February, 2018. All right, but they’re line segments, but I suppose you can’t reasonably draw infinitely vast things in a daily newspaper strip’s space. The lean of that triangle makes it look way more skeptical, even afraid, than I think Price and Piccolo intended, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to get these two in frame without making the composition weird.
Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City rerun for the 1st finally has some specific mathematics mentioned in Heart’s efforts to avoid a mathematics tutor. The bit about the sum of adjacent angles forming a right line being 180 degrees is an important one. A great number of proofs rely on it. I can’t deny the bare fact seems dull, though. I know offhand, for example, that this bit about adjacent angles comes in handy in proving that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. At least for Euclidean geometry. And there are non-Euclidean geometries that are interesting and important and for which that’s not true. Which inspires the question: on a non-Euclidean surface, like say the surface of the Earth, is it that adjacent angles don’t add up to 180 degrees? Or does something else in the proof of a triangle’s interior angles adding up to 180 degrees go wrong?
Bill Whitehead’s Free Range for the 2nd features the classic page full of equations to demonstrate some hard mathematical work. And it is the sort of subject that is done mathematically. The equations don’t look to me anything like what you’d use for asteroid orbit projections. I’d expect forecasting just where an asteroid might hit the Earth to be done partly by analytic formulas that could be done on a blackboard. And then made precise by a numerical estimate. The advantage of the numerical estimate is that stuff like how air resistance affects the path of something in flight is hard to deal with analytically. Numerically, it’s tedious, but we can let the computer deal with the tedium. So there’d be just a boring old computer screen to show on-panel.
Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff reprint for the 2nd is a little baffling. And not really mathematical. It’s just got a bizarre arithmetic error in it. Mutt’s fiancee Encee wants earrings that cost ten dollars (each?) and Mutt takes this to be fifty dollars in earring costs and I have no idea what happened there. Thomas K Dye, the web cartoonist who’s done artwork for various article series, has pointed out that the lettering on these strips have been redone with a computer font. (Look at the letters ‘S’; once you see it, you’ll also notice it in the slightly lumpy ‘O’ and the curly-arrow ‘G’ shapes.) So maybe in the transcription the earring cost got garbled? And then not a single person reading the finished product read it over and thought about what they were doing? I don’t know.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reprint for the 2nd is based, as his efforts to get my attention often are, on a real mathematical physics postulate. As the woman postulates: given a deterministic universe, with known positions and momentums of every particle, and known forces for how all these interact, it seems like it should be possible to predict the future perfectly. It would also be possible to “retrodict” the past. All the laws of physics that we know are symmetric in time; there’s no reason you can’t predict the motion of something one second into the past just as well as you an one second into the future. This fascinating observation took a lot of battery in the 19th century. Many physical phenomena are better described by statistical laws, particularly in thermodynamics, the flow of heat. In these it’s often possible to predict the future well but retrodict the past not at all.
But that looks as though it’s a matter of computing power. We resort to a statistical understanding of, say, the rings of Saturn because it’s too hard to track the billions of positions and momentums we’d need to otherwise. A sufficiently powerful mathematician, for example God, would be able to do that. Fair enough. Then came the 1890s. Henri Poincaré discovered something terrifying about deterministic systems. It’s possible to have chaos. A mathematical representation of a system is a bit different from the original system. There’s some unavoidable error. That’s bound to make some, larger, error in any prediction of its future. For simple enough systems, this is okay. We can make a projection with an error as small as we need, at the cost of knowing the current state of affairs with enough detail. Poincaré found that some systems can be chaotic, though, ones in which any error between the current system and its representation will grow to make the projection useless. (At least for some starting conditions.) And so many interesting systems are chaotic. Incredibly simplified models of the weather are chaotic; surely the actual thing is. This implies that God’s projection of the universe would be an amusing but almost instantly meaningless toy. At least unless it were a duplicate of the universe. In which case we have to start asking our philosopher friends about the nature of identity and what a universe is, exactly.
Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 2nd is an installment of Guy Walks Into A Bar featuring what looks like an arithmetic problem to start. It takes a turn into base-ten jokes. There are times I suspect Ruben Bolling to be a bit of a nerd.
Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 3rd looks like it’s trying to be an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. At least it’s an anthropomorphic something joke.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 3rd originally ran the 8th of December, 1930. It alludes to one of those classic probability questions: what’s the chance that in your lungs is one of the molecules exhaled by Julius Caesar in his dying gasp? Or whatever other event you want: the first breath you ever took, or something exhaled by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount, or exhaled by Sue the T-Rex as she died. Whatever. The chance is always surprisingly high, which reflects the fact there’s a lot of molecules out there. This also reflects a confidence that we can say one molecule of air is “the same” as some molecule if air in a much earlier time. We have to make that supposition to have a problem we can treat mathematically. My understanding is chemists laugh at us if we try to suggest this seriously. Fair enough. But whether the air pumped out of a bicycle tire is ever the same as what’s pumped back in? That’s the same kind of problem. At least some of the molecules of air will be the same ones. Pretend “the same ones” makes sense. Please.
It wasn’t just another busy week from Comic Strip Master Command. And a week busy enough for me to split the mathematics comics into two essays. It was one where I recognized one of the panels as one I’d featured before. Multiple times. Some of the comics I feature are in perpetual reruns and don’t have your classic, deep, Peanuts-style decades of archives to draw from. I don’t usually go checking my archives to see if I’ve mentioned a comic before, not unless something about it stands out. So for me to notice I’ve seen this strip repeatedly can mean only one thing: there was something a little bit annoying about it. Recognize it yet? You will.
Hy Eisman’s Popeye for the 7th of January, 2018 is an odd place for mathematics to come in. J Wellington Wimpy regales Popeye with all the intellectual topics he tried to impress his first love with, and “Euclidean postulates in the original Greek” made the cut. And, fair enough. Euclid’s books are that rare thing that’s of important mathematics (or scientific) merit and that a lay person can just pick up and read, even for pleasure. These days we’re more likely to see a division between mathematics writing that’s accessible but unimportant (you know, like, me) or that’s important but takes years of training to understand. Doing it in the original Greek is some arrogant showing-off, though. Can’t blame Carolyn for bailing on someone pulling that stunt.
Mark O’Hare’s Citizen Dog rerun for the 7th continues last essay’s storyline about Fergus taking Maggie’s place at school. He’s having trouble understanding the story within a story problem. I sympathize.
John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 8th is set in mathematics class. And Edison tries to use a pile of mathematically-tinged words to explain why it’s okay to read a Star Wars book instead of paying attention. Or at least to provide a response the teacher won’t answer. Maybe we can make something out of this by allowing the monetary value of something to be related to its relevance. But if we allow that then Edison’s messed up. I don’t know what quantity is measured by multiplying “every Star Wars book ever written” by “all the movies and merchandise”. But dividing that by the value of the franchise gets … some modest number in peculiar units divided by a large number of dollars. The number value is going to be small. And the dimensions are obviously crazy. Edison needs to pay better attention to the mathematics.
John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 8th of January, 2018. No, I haven’t got any idea how the third panel leads to the fourth. I mean, I know what should lead from there to there — a moment of Edison realizing he’s said something so impolitic he can’t carry on — but that moment isn’t there. The teacher seems to just shrug the whole nonsense off. Something went wrong in the composing of the joke.
Johnny Hart’s B.C. for the 14th of July, 1960 shows off the famous equation of the 20th century. All part of the comic’s anachronism-comedy chic. The strip reran the 9th of January. “E = mc2” is, correctly, associated with Albert Einstein and some of his important publications of 1905. But the expression does have some curious precursors, people who had worked out the relationship (or something close to it) before Einstein and who didn’t quite know what they had. A short piece from Scientific American a couple years back describes pre-Einstein expressions of the equation from Oliver Heaviside, Henri Poincaré, and Fritz Hasenöhrl. I’m not surprised Poincaré had something close to this; it seems like he spent twenty years almost discovering Relativity. That’s all right; he did enough in dynamical systems that mathematicians aren’t going to forget him.
Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 9th draws my eye just because the blackboard lists “Prime Numbers”. Fair enough place setting, although what’s listed are 1, 3, 5, and 7. These days mathematicians don’t tend to list 1 as a prime number; it’s inconvenient. (A lot of proofs depend on their being exactly one way to factorize a number. But you can always multiply a number by ‘1’ a couple more times without changing its value. So ‘6’ is 3 times 2, but it’s also 3 times 2 times 1, or 3 times 2 times 1 times 1, or 3 times 2 times 1145,388,434,247. You can write around that, but it’s easier to define ‘1’ as not a prime.) But it could be defended. I can’t think any reason to leave ‘2’ off a list of prime numbers, though. I think Chatfield conflated odd and prime numbers. If he’d had a bit more blackboard space we could’ve seen whether the next item was 9 or 11 and that would prove the matter.
Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 9th uses arithmetic — square roots — as the kind of thing to test whether a computer’s working. Everyone has their little tests like this. My love’s father likes to test whether the computer knows of the band Walk The Moon or of Christine Korsgaard (a prominent philosopher in my love’s specialty). I’ve got a couple words I like to check dictionaries for. Of course the test is only any good if you know what the answer should be, and what’s the actual square root of 3,278? Goodness knows. It’s got to be between 50 (50 squared is 25 hundred) and 60 (60 squared is 36 hundred). Since 3,278 is so much closer 3,600 than 2,500 its square root should be closer to 60 than to 50. So 57-point-something is plausible. Unfortunately square roots don’t lend themselves to the same sorts of tricks from reading the last digit that cube roots do. And 3,278 isn’t a perfect square anyway. Alexa is right on this one. Also about the specific gravity of cobalt, at least if Wikipedia is right and not conspiring with the artificial intelligences on this one. Catch you in 2021.
November closed out with another of those weeks not quite busy enough to justify splitting into two. I blame Friday and Saturday. Nothing mathematically-themed was happening them. Suppose some days are just like that.
Johnny Hart’s Back To BC for the 26th is an example of using mathematical truths as profound statements. I’m not sure that I’d agree with just stating the Pythagorean Theorem as profound, though. It seems like a profound statement has to have some additional surprising, revelatory elements to it. Like, knowing the Pythagorean theorem is true means we can prove there’s exactly one line parallel to a given line and passing through some point. Who’d see that coming? I don’t blame Hart for not trying to fit all that into one panel, though. Too slow a joke. The strip originally ran the 4th of September, 1960.
Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am rerun for the 26th is a cute little arithmetic-in-real-life panel. I suppose arithmetic-in-real-life. Well, I’m amused and stick around for the footer joke. The strip originally ran the 24th of February, 2002.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes its first appearance for the week on the 26th. It’s an anthropomorphic-numerals joke and some wordplay. Interesting trivia about the whole numbers that never actually impresses people: a whole number is either a perfect square, like 1 or 4 or 9 or 16 are, or else its square root is irrational. There’s no whole number with a square root that’s, like, 7.745 or something. Maybe I just discuss it with people who’re too old. It seems like the sort of thing to reveal to a budding mathematician when she’s eight.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes another appearance the 29th. The joke’s about using the Greek ε, which has a long heritage of use for “a small, positive number”. We use this all the time in analysis. A lot of proofs in analysis are done by using ε in a sort of trick. We want to show something is this value, but it’s too hard to do. Fine. Pick any ε, a positive number of unknown size. So then we’ll find something we can calculate, and show that the difference between the thing we want and the thing we can do is smaller than ε. And that the value of the thing we can calculate is that. Therefore, the difference between what we want and what we can do is smaller than any positive number. And so the difference between them must be zero, and voila! We’ve proved what we wanted to prove. I have always assumed that we use ε for this for the association with “error”, ideally “a tiny error”. If we need another tiny quantity we usually go to δ, probably because it’s close to ε and ‘d’ is still a letter close to ‘e’. (The next letter after ε is ζ, which carries other connotations with it and is harder to write than δ is.) Anyway, Weinersmith is just doing a ha-ha, your penis is small joke.
Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 28th is a counting-sheep joke. It maybe doesn’t belong here but I really, really like the art of the final panel and I want people to see it.
There seems to be no Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for this week. There’ve been some great ones (like on the 26th or the 28th and the 29th) but they’re not at all mathematical. I apologize for the inconvenience and am launching an investigation into this problem.
The most interesting mathematically-themed comic strips from last week were also reruns. So be it; at least I have an excuse to show a 1931-vintage comic. Also, after discovering my old theme didn’t show the category of essay I was posting, I did literally minutes of search for a new theme that did. And that showed tags. And that didn’t put a weird color behind LaTeX inline equations. So I’m using the same theme as my humor blog does, albeit with a different typeface, and we’ll hope that means I don’t post stuff to the wrong blog. As it is I start posting something to the wrong place about once every twenty times. All I want is a WordPress theme with all the good traits of the themes I look at and none of the drawbacks; why is that so hard to get?
Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre rerun for the 5th originally ran the 25th of April, 1931. It’s just a joke about Popeye not being good at bookkeeping. In the story, Popeye’s taking the $50,000 reward from his last adventure and opened a One-Way Bank, giving people whatever money they say they need. And now you understand how the first panel of the last row has several jokes in it. The strip is partly a joke about Popeye being better with stuff he can hit than anything else, of course. I wonder if there’s an old stereotype of sailors being bad at arithmetic. I remember reading about pirate crews that, for example, not-as-canny-as-they-think sailors would demand a fortieth or a fiftieth of the prizes as their pay, instead of a mere thirtieth. But it’s so hard to tell what really happened and what’s just a story about the stupidity of people. Marginal? Maybe, but I’m a Popeye fan and this is my blog, so there.
Bill Rechin’s Crock from the 6th of October, 2017. Yeah, I don’t exactly get the vulture as a pack animal either, but it’s kind of a cute idea. Or I’m a soft touch for cartoon and comic strip vultures. I would like to identify the characters but I forget their names and Wikipedia and the official Comics Kingdom site don’t give me any help.
Norm Feuti’s Gil rerun for the 6th is a subverted word problem joke. And it’s a reminder of how hard story problems can be. You need something that has a mathematics question on point. And the question has to be framed as asking something someone would actually care to learn. Plus the story has to make sense. Much easier when you’re teaching calculus, I think.
Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 6th is a parent-can’t-help-with-homework joke, done with arithmetic since it’s hard to figure another subject that would make the joke possible. I suppose a spelling assignment could be made to work. But that would be hard to write so it didn’t seem contrived.
Thaves’ Frank and Ernest for the 7thfeels like it’s a riff on the old saw about Plato’s Academy. (The young royal sent home with a coin because he asked what the use of this instruction was, and since he must get something from everything, here’s his drachma.) Maybe. Or it’s just the joke that you make if you have “division” and “royals” in mind.
Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 7th is not quite the anthropomorphic symbols joke for this past week. It’s circling that territory, though.
Won’t lie: I was hoping for a busy week. While Comic Strip Master Command did send a healthy number of mathematically-themed comic strips, I can’t say they were a particularly deep set. Most of what I have to say is that here’s a comic strip that mentions mathematics. Well, you’re reading me for that, aren’t you? Maybe. Tell me if you’re not. I’m curious.
Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac rerun for the 2nd of July is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. And a great one, as I’d expect of Thompson, since it also turns into a little bit about how to create characters.
Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 3rd made the most overtly mathematical joke for most of the week at Math Camp. The strip hasn’t got to anything really annoying yet; it’s mostly been average summer-camp jokes. I admit I’ve been distracted trying to figure out if the minor characters are Tatulli redrawing Peanuts characters in his style. I mean, doesn’t Dana (the freckled girl in the third panel, here) look at least a bit like Peppermint Patty? I’ve also seen a Possible Marcie and a Possible Shermy, who’s the Peanuts character people draw when they want an obscure Peanuts character who isn’t 5. (5 is the Boba Fett of the Peanuts character set: an extremely minor one-joke character used for a week in 1963 but who appeared very occasionally in the background until 1983. You can identify him by the ‘5’ on his shirt. He and his sisters 3 and 4 are the ones doing the weird head-sideways dance in A Charlie Brown Christmas.)
Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id Classics for the 4th reruns the Wizard of Id for the 7th of July, 1967. It’s your typical calculation-error problem, this about the forecasting of eclipses. I admit the forecasting of eclipses is one of those bits of mathematics I’ve never understood, but I’ve never tried to understand either. I’ve just taken for granted that the Moon’s movements are too much tedious work to really enlighten me and maybe I should reevaluate that. Understanding when the Moon or the Sun could be expected to disappear was a major concern for people doing mathematics for centuries.
Ashleigh Brilliant’s Pot-Shots rerun for the 5th is a cute little metric system joke. And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that’s enough mathematical content. I’ve come to quite like Brilliant’s cheerfully despairing tone.
John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 8th of July, 2017. So I know it’s a traditional bit of comic strip graphic design to avoid using a . at the end of sentences, as it could be too easily lost — or duplicated — in a printing error. Thus the long history of comic strip sentences that end with a ! mark, unambiguous even if the dot goes missing or gets misaligned. But double exclamation points for everything? What goes on here?
John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith for the 8th finally gives me a graphic to include this week. It’s about the joke you would expect from the topic of probability being mentioned. And, as might be expected, the comic strip doesn’t precisely accurately describe the state of the law. Any human endeavour has to deal with probabilities. They give us the ability to have reasonable certainty about the confusing and ambiguous information the world presents.
Vic Lee’s Pardon My Planet for the 8th is another Albert Einstein mention. The bundle of symbols don’t mean much of anything, at least not as they’re presented, but of course superstar equation E = mc2 turns up. It could hardly not.
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.
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