## Reading the Comics, February 29, 2020: Leap Day Quiet Edition

I can clear out all last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips in one move, it looks like. There were a fair number of strips; it’s just they mostly mention mathematics in passing.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 23rd — a new strip; it’s still in original production for Sundays — has Jason asking his older sister to double-check a mathematics problem. Double-checking work is reliably useful, as proof against mistakes both stupid and subtle. But that’s true of any field.

Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 23rd has Heart preparing for an algebra test.

Jim Unger’s Herman for the 23rd has a parent complaining about the weird New Math. The strip is a rerun and I don’t know from when; it hardly matters. The New Math has been a whipping boy for mathematics education since about ten minutes after its creation. And the complaint attaches to every bit of mathematics education reform ever. I am sympathetic to parents, who don’t see why their children should be the test subjects for a new pedagogy. And who don’t want to re-learn mathematics in order to understand what their children are doing. But, still, let someone know you were a mathematics major and they will tell you how much they didn’t understand or like mathematics in school. It’s hard to see why not try teaching it differently.

(If you do go out pretending to be a mathematics major, don’t worry. If someone challenges you on a thing, cite “Euler’s Theorem”, and you’ll have said something on point. And I’ll cover for you.)

Phil Dunlap’s Ink Pen rerun for the 24th has Bixby Rat complain about his mathematics skills.

Brian Gordon’s Fowl Language for the 25th has a father trying to explain the vastness of Big Numbers to their kid. Past a certain point none of us really know how big a thing is. We can talk about 300 sextillion stars, or anything else, and reason can tell us things about that number. But do we understand it? Like, can we visualize that many stars the way we can imagine twelve stars? This gets us into the philosophy of mathematics pretty soundly. 300 sextillion is no more imaginary than four is, but I know I feel more confident in my understanding of four. How does that make sense? And can you explain that to your kid?

Vic Lee’s Pardon my Planet for the 28th has an appearance by Albert Einstein. And a blackboard full of symbols. The symbols I can make out are more chemistry than mathematics, but they do exist just to serve as decoration.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 28th has Hugo mourning his performance on a mathematics test.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 28th is an installment of The Uncertainty Principal. This is a repeat, even allowing that Super-Fun-Pak Comix are extracted reruns from Tom The Dancing Bug. As I mention in the essay linked there, the uncertainty principle being referred to here is a famous quantum mechanics result. It tells us there are sets of quantities whose values we can’t, even in principle, measure simultaneously to unlimited precision. A precise measurement of, for example, momentum destroys our ability to be precise about position. This is what makes the joke here. The mathematics of this reflects non-commutative sets of operators.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 29th is another with a blackboard full of symbols used to express deep thought on a subject.

And that takes care of last week. I’ll be Reading the Comics for their mathematics content next week, too, although the start of the week has been a slow affair so far. We’ll see if that changes any.

## Reading the Comics, May 16, 2019: Two and Two Edition

It might be more fair to call this a blackboard edition, as three of the strips worth discussing feature that element. But I think I’ve used that name recently. And two of the strips feature specifically 2 + 2, so I’ll use that instead.

And here’s a possible movie heads-up. Turner Classic Movies, United States feed, is showing Monday at 9:30 am (Eastern/Pacific) All-American Chump. All I know about this 1936 movie is from its Leonard Maltin review:

[ Stuart ] Erwin is funny, in his usual country bumpkin way, as a small-town math whiz known as “the human adding machine” who is exploited by card sharks and hustlers. Fairly diverting double-feature item.

People with great powers of calculation were — and still are — with us. Before calculating machines were common they were, pop mathematicians tell us, in demand for doing the kinds of arithmetic mathematicians and engineers need a lot of. They’d also have value in performing, if they can put together some good patter. And, sure, gambling is just another field that needs calculation done well. I have no idea the quality of the film (it’s rated two and a half stars, but Leonard Maltin rates many things two and a half stars). But it’s there if you’re curious. The film also stars Robert Armstrong. I assume it’s not the guy I know but, you know? We live in a strange world. Now on to the comics.

Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy’s The Flying McCoys for the 13th uses the image of a blackboard full of mathematics symbols to represent deep thought. The equations on the board are mostly nonsense, although some, like $E = mc^2$, have obvious meaning. Many of the other symbols have some meaning to them too. In the upper-right corner, for example, is what looks like $E = \hbar \omega$. This any physics major would recognize: it’s the energy of a photon, which is equal to Planck’s constant (that $\hbar$ stuff) times its frequency.

And there are other physics-relevant symbols. In the bottom center is a line that starts $\oint \vec{B}$. The capital B is commonly used to represent a magnetic field. The arrow above the capital B is a warning that this is a vector, which magnetic fields certainly are. (Mathematicians see vectors as a quite abstract concept. Physicists are more likely to see them as an intensity and direction, like forces, and the fields that make fields.) The $\oint$ symbol comes from vector calculus. It represent an integral taken along a closed loop, a shape that goes out along some path and comes back to where it started without crossing itself. This turns out to be useful all the time in dynamics problems. So the McCoys drew something that doesn’t mean anything, but looks ready to mean things.

“Overthinking this” is a problem common to mathematicians, even at an advanced level. Real problems don’t make clear what their boundaries are, the things that are important and the things that aren’t and the things that are convenient but not essential. Making mistakes picking them out, and working too hard on the wrong matters, will happen.

Graham Harrop’s Ten Cats for the 14th sees the cats pondering the counts of vast things. These are famous problems. Archimedes composed a text, The Sand Reckoner, which tried to estimate how much sand there could be in the universe. To work on the question he had to think of new ways to represent numbers. Grains of sand become numerous by being so tiny. Stars become numerous by the universe being so vast. Comparing the two quantities is a good challenge. For both numbers we have to make estimates. The volume of beaches in the world. The typical size of a grain of sand. The number of galaxies in the universe. The typical number of stars in a galaxy. There’s room to dispute all these numbers; we really have to come up with a range of possible values, with maybe some idea of what seems more likely.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 15th has the student bringing authority to his answer. The mathematician is called on to prove an answer is “technically” correct. I’m not sure whether the kid is meant to be prefacing the answer he’s about to give, or whether his answer was rewriting the horizontal “2 + 2 = ” in a vertical form.

Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s The Wizard of Id Classics for the 15th is built around the divisibility of whole numbers, and of relative primes. Setting the fee as some simple integer fraction of the whole has practicality to it. It likely seemed even more practical in the days before currencies decimalized. The common £sd style currency Europeans used before decimals could be subdivided many ways evenly, with one-third of a pound (livre, Reichsgulden, etc) becoming 80 pence (deniers, Pfennig, etc). Unit fractions, and combinations of unit fractions, could offer interesting ways to slice up anything to a desired amount.

Jim Unger’s Herman for the 16th is a student-talking-back-to-the-teacher strip. It also uses the 2 + 2 problem. It’s a common thing for teachers to say they learn from their students. It’s even true, although I son’t know that people ever quite articulate how teachers learn. A good mistake is a great chance to learn. A good mistake shows off a kind of brilliant twist. That the student has understood some but not all of the idea, and has filled in the misunderstood parts with something plausible enough one has to think about why it’s wrong. And why someone would think the wrong idea might be right. There is a kind of mistake that inspires you to think closely about what “right” has to be, and students who know how to make those mistakes are treasures.

And for comic strips that aren’t quite worth a paragraph. Julia Kaye’s Up and Out for the 13th uses mathematics as stand-in for the sort of general education that anybody should master. David Waisglass and Gordon Coulthart’s Farcus for the 17th I don’t think is trying to be a mathematics joke. It’s sufficient joke that the painter’s spelled ‘sign’ wrong. But it did hit on the spelling that would encourage mathematics teachers to notice the strip. Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 18th mentions sudoku.

And with that I am caught up on the past week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. My next Reading the Comics post should be next Sunday, and at this link. Oh, I could have made the edition name something bragging about being on time.

## Reading the Comics, July 1, 2012

This will be a hastily-written installment since I married just this weekend and have other things occupying me. But there’s still comics mentioning math subjects so let me summarize them for you. The first since my last collection of these, on the 13th of June, came on the 15th, with Dave Whamond’s Reality Check, which goes into one of the minor linguistic quirks that bothers me: the claim that one can’t give “110 percent,” since 100 percent is all there is. I don’t object to phrases like “110 percent”, though, since it seems to me the baseline, the 100 percent, must be to some standard reference performance. For example, the Space Shuttle Main Engines routinely operated at around 104 percent, not because they were exceeding their theoretical limits, but because the original design thrust was found to be not quite enough, and the engines were redesigned to deliver more thrust, and it would have been far too confusing to rewrite all the documentation so that the new design thrust was the new 100 percent. Instead 100 percent was the design capacity of an engine which never flew but which existed in paper form. So I’m forgiving of “110 percent” constructions, is the important thing to me.