The end of last week offered just a few more comic strips, and some pretty casual mathematics content. Let me wrap that up.
Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 13th has the “math department lavatory” represented as a door labelled . It’s an interesting joke in that it reads successfully, but doesn’t make sense. To match the references to the commonly excreted substances they’d want .
On funny labels, though, I did once visit a mathematics building in which the dry riser had the label N Bourbaki. Nicholas Bourbaki was not a member of that college’s mathematics department, of course. This is why the joke was correctly formed and therefore funny.
Gary Larson’s The Far Side strips for the 14th includes the famous one of Albert Einstein coming so close to working out . The usual derivations for don’t start with that and then explore whether it makes sense, which is what Einstein seems to be doing here. Instead they start from some uncontroversial premises and find that they imply this business. Dimensional analysis would also let you know that, if c is involved, it’s probably to the second power rather than anything else.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t imagine Einstein assuming there must be a relationship between energy and mass, finding one that makes sense, and then finding a reason it’s that rather than something else. That’s a common enough pattern of mathematical discovery. Also, a detail I hadn’t noticed before, is that Einstein tried out , rejected it, and then tried it again. This is also a common pattern of discovery.
Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 15th depicts a couple ancient Greek deep-thinkers. A bit of mathematics, specifically geometry, is used as representative of that deep thinking.
I concede I am late in wrapping up last week’s mathematically-themed comics. But please understand there were important reasons for my not having posted this earlier, like, I didn’t get it written in time. I hope you understand and agree with me about this.
Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 9th brings up mathematics in a discussion about perfection. The debate of perfection versus “messiness” begs some important questions. What I’m marginally competent to discuss is the idea of mathematics as this perfect thing. Mathematics seems to have many traits that are easy to think of as perfect. That everything in it should follow from clearly stated axioms, precise definitions, and deductive logic, for example. This makes mathematics seem orderly and universal and fair in a way that the real world never is. If we allow that this is a kind of perfection then … does mathematics reach it?
Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 9th of May, 2019. I am surprised to learn this is not a new tag. Essays discussing Zippy the Pinhead are at this link. Ernie, here, is Ernie Bushmiller, creator and longtime artist and writer for Nancy. He’s held in regard by some of the art community for his economic and streamlined drawing and writing style. You might or might not like his jokes, but you can’t deny that he made it easy to understand what was supposed to be funny and why it was supposed to be. It’s worth study if you like to know how comic strips can work.
Even the idea of a “precise definition” is perilous. If it weren’t there wouldn’t be so many pop mathematics articles about why 1 isn’t a prime number. It’s difficult to prove that any particular set of axioms that give us interesting results are also logically consistent. If they’re not consistent, then we can prove absolutely anything, including that the axioms are false. That seems imperfect. And few mathematicians even prepare fully complete, step-by-step proofs of anything. It takes ridiculously long to get anything done if you try. The proofs we present tend to show, instead, the reasoning in enough detail that we’re confident we could fill in the omitted parts if we really needed them for some reason. And that’s fine, nearly all the time, but it does leave the potential for mistakes present.
Zippy offers up a perfect parallelogram. Making it geometry is of good symbolic importance. Everyone knows geometric figures, and definitions of some basic ideas like a line or a circle or, maybe, a parallelogram. Nobody’s ever seen one, though. There’s never been a straight line, much less two parallel lines, and even less the pair of parallel lines we’d need for a parallellogram. There can be renderings good enough to fool the eye. But none of the lines are completely straight, not if we examine closely enough. None of the pairs of lines are truly parallel, not if we extend them far enough. The figure isn’t even two-dimensional, not if it’s rendered in three-dimensional things like atoms or waves of light or such. We know things about parallelograms, which don’t exist. They tell us some things about their shadows in the real world, at least.
Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 9th is a play on the old joke about “a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, soon you’re talking about real money”. As we hear more about larger numbers they seem familiar and accessible to us, to the point that they stop seeming so big. A trillion is still a massive number, at least for most purposes. If you aren’t doing combinatorics, anyway; just yesterday I was doing a little toy problem and realized it implied 470,184,984,576 configurations. Which still falls short of a trillion, but had I made one arbitrary choice differently I could’ve blasted well past a trillion.
Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 9th is another monkeys-at-typewriters joke, that great thought experiment about probability and infinity. I should add it to my essay about the Infinite Monkey Theorem. Part of the joke is that the monkey is thinking about the content of the writing. This doesn’t destroy the prospect that a monkey given enough time would write any of the works of William Shakespeare. It makes the simple estimates of how unlikely that is, and how long it would take to do, invalid. But the event might yet happen. Suppose this monkey decided there was no credible way to delay Hamlet’s revenge to Act V, and tried to write accordingly. Mightn’t the monkey make a mistake? It’s easy to type a letter you don’t mean to. Or a word you don’t mean to. Why not a sentence you don’t mean to? Why not a whole act you don’t mean to? Impossible? No, just improbable. And the monkeys have enough time to let the improbable happen.
Eric the Circle for the 10th, this one by Kingsnake, declares itself set in “the 20th dimension, where shape has no meaning”. This plays on a pop-cultural idea of dimensions as a kind of fairyland, subject to strange and alternate rules. A mathematician wouldn’t think of dimensions that way. 20-dimensional spaces — and even higher-dimensional spaces — follow rules just as two- and three-dimensional spaces do. They’re harder to draw, certainly, and mathematicians are not selected for — or trained in — drawing, at least not in United States schools. So attempts at rendering a high-dimensional space tend to be sort of weird blobby lumps, maybe with a label “N-dimensional”.
And a projection of a high-dimensional shape into lower dimensions will be weird. I used to have around here a web site with a rotatable tesseract, which would draw a flat-screen rendition of what its projection in three-dimensional space would be. But I can’t find it now and probably it ran as a Java applet that you just can’t get to work anymore. Anyway, non-interactive videos of this sort of thing are common enough; here’s one that goes through some of the dimensions of a tesseract, one at a time. It’ll give some idea how something that “should” just be a set of cubes will not look so much like that.
Steve Kelly and Jeff Parker’s Dustin for the 11th is a variation on the “why do I have to learn this” protest. This one is about long division and the question of why one needs to know it when there’s cheap, easily-available tools that do the job better. It’s a fair question and Hayden’s answer is a hard one to refute. I think arithmetic’s worth knowing how to do, but I’ll also admit, if I need to divide something by 23 I’m probably letting the computer do it.
I’d promised on Sunday the remainder of last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. I got busy with house chores yesterday and failed to post on time. That’s why this is late. It’s only a couple of comics here, but it does include my list of strips that I didn’t think were on-topic enough. You might like them, or be able to use them, yourself, though.
Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 14th depicts a kid enthusiastic about the abilities of mathematics to uncover truths. Suppressed truths, in this case. Well, it’s not as if mathematics hasn’t been put to the service of conspiracy theories before. Mathematics holds a great promise of truth. Answers calculated correctly are, after all, universally true. They can also offer a hypnotizing precision, with all the digits past the decimal point that anyone could want. But one catch among many is whether your calculations are about anything relevant to what you want to know. Another is whether the calculations were done correctly. It’s easy to make a mistake. If one thinks one has found exciting results it’s hard to imagine even looking for one.
You can’t use shadow analysis to prove the Moon landings fake. But the analysis of shadows can be good mathematics. It can locate things in space and in time. This is a kind of “inverse problem”: given this observable result, what combinations of light and shadow and position would have caused that? And there is a related problem. Johannes Vermeer produced many paintings with awesome, photorealistic detail. One hypothesis for how he achieved this skill is that he used optical tools, including a camera obscura and appropriate curved mirrors. So, is it possible to use the objects shown in perspective in his paintings to project where the original objects had to be, and where the painter had to be, to see them? We can calculate this, at least. I am not well enough versed in art history to say whether we have compelling answers.
Art Sansom and Chip Sansom’s The Born Loser for the 16th is the rare Roman Numerals joke strip that isn’t anthropomorphizing the numerals. Or a play on how the numerals used are also letters. But yeah, there’s not much use for them that isn’t decorative. Hindu-Arabic numerals have great advantages in compactness, and multiplication and division, and handling fractions of a whole number. And handling big numbers. Roman numerals are probably about as good for adding or subtracting small numbers, but that’s not enough of what we do anymore.
And past that there were three comic strips that had some mathematics element. But they were slight ones, and I didn’t feel I could write about them at length. Might like them anyway. Gordon Bess’s Redeye for the 10th of February, and originally run the 24th of September, 1972, has the start of a word problem as example of Pokey’s homework. Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 11th has a couple scientist-types standing in front of a board with some mathematics symbols. The symbols don’t quite parse, to me, but they look close to it. Like, the line about is close to what one would write for the Fourier transformation of the function named l. It would need to be more like and even then it wouldn’t be quite done. So I guess Litzler used some actual reference but only copied as much as worked for the composition. (Which is not a problem, of course. The mathematics has no role in this strip beyond its visual appeal, so only the part that looks good needs to be there.) The Fourier transform’s a commonly-used trick; among many things, it lets us replace differential equations (hard, but instructive, and everywhere) with polynomials (comfortable and familiar and well-understood). Finally among the not-quite-comment-worthy is Pascal Wyse and Joe Berger’s Berger And Wyse for the 12th, showing off a Venn Diagram for its joke.
And now, closer to deadline than I like, let me wrap up last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. I had a lot happening, that’s all I can say.
Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy’s The Flying McCoys for the 10th is another tragic moment in the mathematics department. I’m amused that white lab coats are taken to read as “mathematician”. There are mathematicians who work in laboratories, naturally. Many interesting problems are about real-world things that can be modelled and tested and played with. It’s hardly the mathematics-department uniform, but then, I’m not sure mathematicians have a uniform. We just look like academics is all.
Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy’s The Flying McCoys for the 10th of May, 2018. I suppose the piece of chalk serves as a mathematician’s professional badge, but it would be odd for a person walking in to the room to happen to have a piece. I mean, there’s good reason he might, since there’s never enough chalk in the right places and it has to be stolen from somewhere. But that’s a bit too much backstory for a panel like this.
It also shows off that motif of mathematicians as doing anything with numbers in a more complicated way than necessary. I can’t imagine anyone in an emergency trying to evoke 9-1-1 by solving any kind of puzzle. But comic strip characters are expected to do things at least a bit ridiculously. I suppose.
Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 11th is about random numbers. We need random numbers; they do so much good. Getting them is hard. People are pretty lousy at picking random numbers in their head. We can say what “lousy” random numbers look like. They look wrong. There’s digits that don’t get used as much as the others do. There’s strings of digits that don’t get used as much as other strings of the same length do. There are patterns, and they can be subtle ones, that just don’t look right.
And yet we have a terrible time trying to say what good random numbers look like. Suppose we want to have a string of random zeroes and ones: is 101010 better or worse than 110101? Or 000111? Well, for a string of digits that short there’s no telling. It’s in big batches that we should expect to see no big patterns. … Except that occasionally randomness should produce patterns. How often should we expect patterns, and of what size? This seems to depend on what patterns we’ve found interesting enough to look for. But how can the cultural quirks that make something seem interesting be a substantial mathematical property?
Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 11th uses mathematics-assessment tests for its joke. It’s of marginal relevance, yes, but it does give me a decent pretext to include the new artist’s work here. I don’t know how long the Internet is going to be interested in Nancy. I have to get what attention I can while it lasts.
Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 12th is the anthropomorphic-geometry joke for the week. Unless there was one I already did Sunday that I already forgot. Oh, no, that was anthropomorphic-numerals. It’s easy to see why a circle might be labelled irrational: either its radius or its area has to be. Both can be. The triangle, though …
Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 12th of May, 2018. Will admit that I hadn’t heard of Heronian Triangles before I started poking around this, and I started to speculate whether it was even possible for all three legs of a triangle to be rational and the area also be rational. So you can imagine what I felt like when I did some searching and found the 5-12-13 right triangle, since that’s just the other Pythagorean Triplet you learn after the 3-4-5 one. Oh, I guess also the 3-4-5 one.
Well, that’s got me thinking. Obviously all the sides of a triangle can be rational, and so its perimeter can be too. But … the area of an equilateral triangle is times the square of the length of any side. It can have a rational side and an irrational area, or vice-versa. Just as the circle has. If it’s not an equilateral triangle?
Can you have a triangle that has three rational sides and a rational area? And yes, you can. Take the right triangle that has sides of length 5, 12, and 13. Or any scaling of that, larger or smaller. There is indeed a whole family of triangles, the Heronian Triangles. All their sides are integers, and their areas are integers too. (Sides and areas rational are just as good as sides and areas integers. If you don’t see why, now you see why.) So there’s that at least. The name derives from Heron/Hero, the ancient Greek mathematician whom we credit with that snappy formula that tells us, based on the lengths of the three sides, what the area of the triangle is. Not the Pythagorean formula, although you can get the Pythagorean formula from it.
Still, I’m going to bet that there’s some key measure of even a Heronian Triangle that ends up being irrational. Interior angles, most likely. And there are many ways to measure triangles; they can’t all end up being rational at once. There are over two thousand ways to define a “center” of a triangle, for example. The odds of hitting a rational number on all of them at once? (Granted, most of these triangle centers are unknown except to the center’s discoverer/definer and that discoverer’s proud but baffled parents.)
Carla Ventresca and Henry Beckett’s On A Claire Day for the 12th mentions taking classes in probability and statistics. They’re the classes nobody doubts are useful in the real world. It’s easy to figure probability is more likely to be needed than functional analysis on some ordinary day outside the university. I can’t even compose that last sentence without the language of probability.
I’d kind of agree with calling the courses intense, though. Well, “intense” might not be the right word. But challenging. Not that you’re asked to prove anything deep. The opposite, really. An introductory course in either provides a lot of tools. Many of them require no harder arithmetic work than multiplication, division, and the occasional square root. But you do need to learn which tool to use in which scenario. And there’s often not the sorts of proofs that make it easy to understand which tool does what. Doing the proofs would require too much fussing around. Many of them demand settling finicky little technical points that take you far from the original questions. But that leaves the course as this archipelago of small subjects, each easy in themselves. But the connections between them are obscured. Is that better or worse? It must depend on the person hoping to learn.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 21st mentions mathematics — geometry, primarily — as something a substitute teacher has tried teaching with the use of a cucumber and condom. These aren’t terrible examples to use to make concrete the difference between volumes and surface areas. There are limitations, though. It’s possible to construct a shape that has a finite volume but an infinitely large surface area, albeit not using cucumbers.
There’s also a mention of the spring constant, and physics. This isn’t explicitly mathematical. But the description of movement on a spring are about the first interesting differential equation of mathematical physics. The solution is that of simple harmonic motion. I don’t think anyone taking the subject for the first time would guess at the answer. But it’s easy enough to verify it’s right. And this motion — sine waves — just turns up everywhere in mathematical physics.
Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd just mentions mathematics as a topic Hugo finds challenging, and what’s challenging about it. So a personal story: when I took Intro to Linear Algebra my freshman year one day I spaced on the fact we had an exam. So, I put the textbook on the shelf under my desk, and then forgot to take it when I left. The book disappeared, of course, and the professor never heard of it being turned in to lost-and-found or anything. Fortunately the homework was handwritten questions passed out on photocopies (ask your parents), so I could still do the assignments, but for all those, you know, definitions and examples I had to rely on my own notes. I don’t know why I couldn’t ask a classmate. Shyness, probably. Came through all right, though.
Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd of February, 2018. Whose house are they at? I mean, did Tiger bring his dog to Hugo’s, or did Hugo bring his homework to Tiger’s house? I guess either’s not that odd, especially if they just got out of school, but then Hugo’s fussing with his homework when he’s right out of school and with Tiger?
Cathy Law’s Claw for the 23rd technically qualifies as an anthropomorphic-numerals joke, in this panel about the smothering of education by the infection of guns into American culture.
Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 23rd has wealthy child Wedgwick unsatisfied with a mere ball of snow. He instead has a snow Truncated Icosahedron (the hyphens in Jarvis’s word balloon may baffle the innocent reader). This is a real shape, one that’s been known for a very long time. It’s one of the Archimedean Solids, a set of 13 solids that have convex shapes (no holes or indents or anything) and have all vertices the same, the identical number of edges coming in to each point in the same relative directions. The truncated icosahedron you maybe also know as the soccer ball shape, at least for those old-style soccer balls made of patches that were hexagons and pentagons. An actual truncated icosahedron needs twelve pentagons, so the figure drawn in the third panel isn’t quite right. At least one pentagonal face would be visible. But that’s also tricky to draw. The aerodynamics of a truncated icosahedron are surely different from those of a sphere. But in snowball-fight conditions, probably not different enough to even notice.
Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 24th uses a blackboard full of formulas to represent an overcomplicated answer. The formulas look, offhand, like gibberish to me. But I’ll admit uncertainty since the odd capitalization of “iG(p)” at the start makes me think of some deeper group theory or knot theory symbols. And to see an “m + p” and an “m – p” makes me think of quantum mechanics of atomic orbitals. (But then an “m – p2” is weird.) So if this were anything I’d say it was some quantum chemistry formula. But my gut says if Litzler did take the blackboard symbols from anything, it was without going back to references. (Which he has no need to do, I should point out; the joke wouldn’t be any stronger — or weaker — if the blackboard meant anything.)
The back half of last week’s mathematically themed comic strips aren’t all that deep. They make up for it by being numerous. This is how calculus works, so, good job, Comic Strip Master Command. Here’s what I have for you.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 20th marks its long-awaited return to these Reading The Comics posts. It’s of the traditional form of the student misunderstanding the teacher’s explanations. Arithmetic edition.
Marty Links’s Emmy Lou for the 20th was a rerun from the 22nd of September, 1976. It’s just a name-drop. It’s not like it matters for the joke which textbook was lost. I just include it because, what the heck, might as well.
Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 21st uses the form of a story problem. It’s a trick question anyway; there’s really no way the Doppler effect is going to make an ice cream truck’s song unrecognizable, not even at highway speeds. Too distant to hear, that’s a possibility. Also I don’t know how strictly regional this is but the ice cream trucks around here have gone in for interrupting the music every couple seconds with some comical sound effect, like a “boing” or something. I don’t know what this hopes to achieve besides altering the timeline of when the ice cream seller goes mad.
Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 21st I already snuck in here last week, in talking about ‘x’. The variable does seem like a good starting point. And, yeah, hypothesis block is kind of a thing. There’s nothing quite like staring at a problem that should be interesting and having no idea where to start. This happens even beyond grade school and the story problems you do then. What to do about it? There’s never one thing. Study it a good while, read about related problems a while. Maybe work on something that seems less obscure a while. It’s very much like writer’s block.
Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics rerun for the 22nd straddles the borders between mathematics, economics, and psychology. It’s a problem about making forecasts about other people’s behavior. It’s a mystery of game theory. I don’t know a proper analysis for this game. I expect it depends on how many rounds you get to play: if you have a sense of what people typically do, you can make a good guess of what they will do. If everyone gets a single shot to play, all kinds of crazy things might happen.
Jef Mallet’s Frazz gets in again on the 22nd with some mathematics gibberish-talk, including some tossing around of the commutative property. Among other mistakes Caulfield was making here, going from “less is more to therefore more is less” isn’t commutation. Commutation is about binary operations, where you match a pair of things to a single thing. The operation commutes if it never matters what the order of the pair of things is. It doesn’t commute if it ever matters, even a single time, what the order is. Commutativity gets introduced in arithmetic where there are some good examples of the thing. Addition and multiplication commute. Subtraction and division don’t. From there it gets forgotten until maybe eventually it turns up in matrix multiplication, which doesn’t commute. And then it gets forgotten once more until maybe group theory. There, whether operations commute or not is as important a divide as the one between vertebrates and invertebrates. But I understand kids not getting why they should care about commuting. Early on it seems like a longwinded way to say what’s obvious about addition.
Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd of September, 2017. Do have to wonder what’s going through Julian’s head. On the one hand, he’s getting one doughnut, come what may. On the other, he’s really not needed for the joke since it would play just as well with three doughnuts to split between Hugo and Punkinhead. I suppose cutting a doughnut in thirds is more unthinkable than cutting a doughnut in half, but neither one’s an easy thing for me to imagine.
Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd starts with a real-world example of your classic story problem. I like the joke in it, and I also like Hugo’s look of betrayal and anger in the second panel. A spot of expressive art will do so good for a joke.
We come now almost to the end of the Summer 2017 A To Z. Possibly also the end of all these A To Z sequences. Gaurish of, For the love of Mathematics, proposed that I talk about the obvious logical choice. The last promising thing I hadn’t talked about. I have no idea what to do for future A To Z’s, if they’re even possible anymore. But that’s a problem for some later time.
Some good advice that I don’t always take. When starting a new problem, make a list of all the things that seem likely to be relevant. Problems that are worth doing are usually about things. They’ll be quantities like the radius or volume of some interesting surface. The amount of a quantity under consideration. The speed at which something is moving. The rate at which that speed is changing. The length something has to travel. The number of nodes something must go across. Whatever. This all sounds like stuff from story problems. But most interesting mathematics is from a story problem; we want to know what this property is like. Even if we stick to a purely mathematical problem, there’s usually a couple of things that we’re interested in and that we describe. If we’re attacking the four-color map theorem, we have the number of territories to color. We have, for each territory, the number of territories that touch it.
Next, select a name for each of these quantities. Write it down, in the table, next to the term. The volume of the tank is ‘V’. The radius of the tank is ‘r’. The height of the tank is ‘h’. The fluid is flowing in at a rate ‘r’. The fluid is flowing out at a rate, oh, let’s say ‘s’. And so on. You might take a moment to go through and think out which of these variables are connected to which other ones, and how. Volume, for example, is surely something to do with the radius times something to do with the height. It’s nice to have that stuff written down. You may not know the thing you set out to solve, but you at least know you’ve got this under control.
I recommend this. It’s a good way to organize your thoughts. It establishes what things you expect you could know, or could want to know, about the problem. It gives you some hint how these things relate to each other. It sets you up to think about what kinds of relationships you figure to study when you solve the problem. It gives you a lifeline, when you’re lost in a sea of calculation. It’s reassurance that these symbols do mean something. Better, it shows what those things are.
I don’t always do it. I have my excuses. If I’m doing a problem that’s very like one I’ve already recently done, the things affecting it are probably the same. The names to give these variables are probably going to be about the same. Maybe I’ll make a quick sketch to show how the parts of the problem relate. If it seems like less work to recreate my thoughts than to write them down, I skip writing them down. Not always good practice. I tell myself I can always go back and do things the fully right way if I do get lost. So far that’s been true.
So, the names. Suppose I am interested in, say, the length of the longest rod that will fit around this hallway corridor. Then I am in a freshman calculus book, yes. Fine. Suppose I am interested in whether this pinball machine can be angled up the flight of stairs that has a turn in it Then I will measure things like the width of the pinball machine. And the width of the stairs, and of the landing. I will measure this carefully. Pinball machines are heavy and there are many hilarious sad stories of people wedging them into hallways and stairwells four and a half stories up from the street. But: once I have identified, say, ‘width of pinball machine’ as a quantity of interest, why would I ever refer to it as anything but?
This is no dumb question. It is always dangerous to lose the link between the thing we calculate and the thing we are interested in. Without that link we are less able to notice mistakes in either our calculations or the thing we mean to calculate. Without that link we can’t do a sanity check, that reassurance that it’s not plausible we just might fit something 96 feet long around the corner. Or that we estimated that we could fit something of six square feet around the corner. It is common advice in programming computers to always give variables meaningful names. Don’t write ‘T’ when ‘Total’ or, better, ‘Total_Value_Of_Purchase’ is available. Why do we disregard this in mathematics, and switch to ‘T’ instead?
First reason is, well, try writing this stuff out. Your hand (h) will fall off (foff) in about fifteen minutes, twenty seconds. (15′ 20”). If you’re writing a program, the programming environment you have will auto-complete the variable after one or two letters in. Or you can copy and paste the whole name. It’s still good practice to leave a comment about what the variable should represent, if the name leaves any reasonable ambiguity.
Another reason is that sure, we do specific problems for specific cases. But a mathematician is naturally drawn to thinking of general problems, in abstract cases. We see something in common between the problem “a length and a quarter of the length is fifteen feet; what is the length?” and the problem “a volume plus a quarter of the volume is fifteen gallons; what is the volume?”. That one is about lengths and the other about volumes doesn’t concern us. We see a saving in effort by separating the quantity of a thing from the kind of the thing. This restores danger. We must think, after we are done calculating, about whether the answer could make sense. But we can minimize that, we hope. At the least we can check once we’re done to see if our answer makes sense. Maybe even whether it’s right.
For centuries, as the things we now recognize as algebra developed, we would use words. We would talk about the “thing” or the “quantity” or “it”. Some impersonal name, or convenient pronoun. This would often get shortened because anything you write often you write shorter. “Re”, perhaps. In the late 16th century we start to see the “New Algebra”. Here mathematics starts looking like … you know … mathematics. We start to see stuff like “addition” represented with the + symbol instead of an abbreviation for “addition” or a p with a squiggle over it or some other shorthand. We get equals signs. You start to see decimals and exponents. And we start to see letters used in place of numbers whose value we don’t know.
There are a couple kinds of “numbers whose value we don’t know”. One is the number whose value we don’t know, but hope to learn. This is the classic variable we want to solve for. Another kind is the number whose value we don’t know because we don’t care. I mean, it has some value, and presumably it doesn’t change over the course of our problem. But it’s not like our work will be so different if, say, the tank is two feet high rather than four.
Is there a problem? If we pick our letters to fit a specific problem, no. Presumably all the things we want to describe have some clear name, and some letter that best represents the name. It’s annoying when we have to consider, say, the pinball machine width and the corridor width. But we can work something out.
But what about general problems?
Is an easy problem to solve?
If we want to figure what ‘m’ is, yes. Similarly ‘y’. If we want to know what ‘b’ is, it’s tedious, but we can do that. If we want to know what ‘e’ is? Run and hide, that stuff is crazy. If you have to, do it numerically and accept an estimate. Don’t try figuring what that is.
And so we’ve developed conventions. There are some letters that, except in weird circumstances, are coefficients. They’re numbers whose value we don’t know, but either don’t care about or could look up. And there are some that, by default, are variables. They’re the ones whose value we want to know.
These conventions started forming, as mentioned, in the late 16th century. François Viète here made a name that lasts to mathematics historians at least. His texts described how to do algebra problems in the sort of procedural methods that we would recognize as algebra today. And he had a great idea for these letters. Use the whole alphabet, if needed. Use the consonants to represent the coefficients, the numbers we know but don’t care what they are. Use the vowels to represent the variables, whose values we want to learn. So he would look at that equation and see right away: it’s a terrible mess. (I exaggerate. He doesn’t seem to have known the = sign, and I don’t know offhand when ‘log’ and ‘cos’ became common. But suppose the rest of the equation were translated into his terminology.)
It’s not a bad approach. Besides the mnemonic value of consonant-coefficient, vowel-variable, it’s true that we usually have fewer variables than anything else. The more variables in a problem the harder it is. If someone expects you to solve an equation with ten variables in it, you’re excused for refusing. So five or maybe six or possibly seven choices for variables is plenty.
But it’s not what we settled on. René Descartes had a better idea. He had a lot of them, but here’s one. Use the letters at the end of the alphabet for the unknowns. Use the letters at the start of the alphabet for coefficients. And that is, roughly, what we’ve settled on. In my example nightmare equation, we’d suppose ‘y’ to probably be the variable we want to solve for.
And so, and finally, x. It is almost the variable. It says “mathematics” in only two strokes. Even π takes more writing. Descartes used it. We follow him. It’s way off at the end of the alphabet. It starts few words, very few things, almost nothing we would want to measure. (Xylem … mass? Flow? What thing is the xylem anyway?) Even mathematical dictionaries don’t have much to say about it. The letter transports almost no connotations, no messy specific problems to it. If it suggests anything, it suggests the horizontal coordinate in a Cartesian system. It almost is mathematics. It signifies nothing in itself, but long use has given it an identity as the thing we hope to learn by study.
And pirate treasure maps. I don’t know when ‘X’ became the symbol of where to look for buried treasure. My casual reading suggests “never”. Treasure maps don’t really exist. Maps in general don’t work that way. Or at least didn’t before cartoons. X marking the spot seems to be the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, renowned for creating a fanciful map and then putting together a book to justify publishing it. (I jest. But according to Simon Garfield’s On The Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way The World Looks, his map did get lost on the way to the publisher, and he had to re-create it from studying the text of Treasure Island. This delights me to no end.) It makes me wonder if Stevenson was thinking of x’s service in mathematics. But the advantages of x as a symbol are hard to ignore. It highlights a point clearly. It’s fast to write. Its use might be coincidence.
But it is a letter that does a needed job really well.
If there was a theme this week, it was puzzles. So many strips had little puzzles to work out. You’ll see. Thank you.
Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 30th of April tries to address my loss of Jumble panels. Thank you, whoever at Comic Strip Master Command passed along word of my troubles. I won’t spoil your fun. As sometimes happens with a Jumble you can work out the joke punchline without doing any of the earlier ones. 64 in binary would be written 1000000. And from this you know what fits in all the circles of the unscrambled numbers. This reduces a lot of the scrambling you have to do: just test whether 341 or 431 is a prime number. Check whether 8802, 8208, or 2808 is divisible by 117. The integer cubed you just have to keep trying possibilities. But only one combination is the cube of an integer. The factorial of 12, just, ugh. At least the circles let you know you’ve done your calculations right.
Steve McGarry’s activity feature Kidtown for the 30th plays with numbers some. And a puzzle that’ll let you check how well you can recognize multiples of four that are somewhere near one another. You can use diagonals too; that’s important to remember.
Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute feature for the 30th is also a celebration of numerals. Enjoy the brain teaser about why the encoding makes sense. I don’t believe the hype about NASA engineers needing days to solve a puzzle kids got in minutes. But if it’s believable, is it really hype?
Marty Links’s Emmy Lou from the 29th of October, 1963 was rerun the 2nd of May. It’s a reminder that mathematics teachers of the early 60s also needed something to tape to their doors.
Mel Henze’s Gentle Creatures rerun for the 2nd of May is another example of the conflating of “can do arithmetic” with “intelligence”.
Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 2nd name-drops the Null Hypothesis. I’m not sure what Litzler is going for exactly. The Null Hypothesis, though, comes to us from statistics and from inference testing. It turns up everywhere when we sample stuff. It turns up in medicine, in manufacturing, in psychology, in economics. Everywhere we might see something too complicated to run the sorts of unambiguous and highly repeatable tests that physics and chemistry can do — things that are about immediately practical questions — we get to testing inferences. What we want to know is, is this data set something that could plausibly happen by chance? Or is it too far out of the ordinary to be mere luck? The Null Hypothesis is the explanation that nothing’s going on. If your sample is weird in some way, well, everything is weird. What’s special about your sample? You hope to find data that will let you reject the Null Hypothesis, showing that the data you have is so extreme it just can’t plausibly be chance. Or to conclude that you fail to reject the Null Hypothesis, showing that the data is not so extreme that it couldn’t be chance. We don’t accept the Null Hypothesis. We just allow that more data might come in sometime later.
I don’t know what Litzler is going for with this. I feel like I’m missing a reference and I’ll defer to a finance blogger’s Reading the Comics post.
Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 3rd is another in the string of jokes using arithmetic as source of indisputably true facts. And once again it’s “2 + 2 = 5”. Somehow one plus one never rates in this use.
Aaron Johnson’s W T Duck rerun for the 3rd is the Venn Diagram joke for this week. It’s got some punch to it, too.
Je Mallett’s Frazz for the 5th took me some time to puzzle out. I’ll allow it.
It was another of those curious weeks when Comic Strip Master Command didn’t send quite enough comics my way. Among those they did send were a couple of strips in pairs. I can work with that.
In Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 26th Caulfield ponders what we know about Pythagoras. It’s hard to say much about the historical figure: he built a cult that sounds outright daft around himself. But it’s hard to say how much of their craziness was actually their craziness, how much was just that any ancient society had a lot of what seems nutty to us, and how much was jokes (or deliberate slander) directed against some weirdos. What does seem certain is that Pythagoras’s followers attributed many of their discoveries to him. And what’s certain is that the Pythagorean Theorem was known, at least a thing that could be used to measure things, long before Pythagoras was on the scene. I’m not sure if it was proved as a theorem or whether it was just known that making triangles with the right relative lengths meant you had a right triangle.
Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 28th of February — reprinting the strip from the same day in 1989 — uses a bit of arithmetic as generic homework. It’s an interesting change of pace that the mathematics homework is what keeps one from sleep. I don’t blame Luann or Puddles for not being very interested in this, though. Those sorts of complicated-fraction-manipulation problems, at least when I was in middle school, were always slogs of shuffling stuff around. They rarely got to anything we’d like to know.
Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 1st of March is one of those little revelations that statistics can give one. Myself, I was always haunted by the line in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos about how, in the future, with the Sun ageing and (presumably) swelling in size and heat, the Earth would see one last perfect day. That there would most likely be quite fine days after that didn’t matter, and that different people might disagree on what made a day perfect didn’t matter. Setting out the idea of a “perfect day” and realizing there would someday be a last gave me chills. It still does.
Richard Thompson’s Poor Richard’s Almanac for the 1st and the 2nd of March have appeared here before. But I like the strip so I’ll reuse them too. They’re from the strip’s guide to types of Christmas trees. The Cubist Fur is described as “so asymmetrical it no longer inhabits Euclidean space”. Properly neither do we, but we can’t tell by eye the difference between our space and a Euclidean space. “Non-Euclidean” has picked up connotations of being so bizarre or even horrifying that we can’t hope to understand it. In practice, it means we have to go a little slower and think about, like, what would it look like if we drew a triangle on a ball instead of a sheet of paper. The Platonic Fir, in the 2nd of March strip, looks like a geometry diagram and I doubt that’s coincidental. It’s very hard to avoid thoughts of Platonic Ideals when one does any mathematics with a diagram. We know our drawings aren’t very good triangles or squares or circles especially. And three-dimensional shapes are worse, as see every ellipsoid ever done on a chalkboard. But we know what we mean by them. And then we can get into a good argument about what we mean by saying “this mathematical construct exists”.
Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 3rd uses a chalkboard full of mathematics to represent the deep thinking behind a silly little thing. I can’t make any of the symbols out to mean anything specific, but I do like the way it looks. It’s quite well-done in looking like the shorthand that, especially, physicists would use while roughing out a problem. That there are subscripts with forms like “12” and “22” with a bar over them reinforces that. I would, knowing nothing else, expect this to represent some interaction between particles 1 and 2, and 2 with itself, and that the bar means some kind of complement. This doesn’t mean much to me, but with luck, it means enough to the scientist working it out that it could be turned into a coherent paper.
Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 3rd of March, 2017. Fi’s dress isn’t one of those … kinds with the complicated pattern of holes in it. She got it torn while trying to escape the wedding and falling into the basement.
Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack is this week about the wedding of the accounting-minded Fi. And she’s having last-minute doubts, which is why the strip of the 3rd brings in irrational and anthropomorphized numerals. π gets called in to serve as emblematic of the irrational numbers. Can’t fault that. I think the only more famously irrational number is the square root of two, and π anthropomorphizes more easily. Well, you can draw an established character’s face onto π. The square root of 2 is, necessarily, at least two disconnected symbols and you don’t want to raise distracting questions about whether the root sign or the 2 gets the face.
That said, it’s a lot easier to prove that the square root of 2 is irrational. Even the Pythagoreans knew it, and a bright child can follow the proof. A really bright child could create a proof of it. To prove that π is irrational is not at all easy; it took mathematicians until the 19th century. And the best proof I know of the fact does it by a roundabout method. We prove that if a number (other than zero) is rational then the tangent of that number must be irrational, and vice-versa. And the tangent of π/4 is 1, so therefore π/4 must be irrational, so therefore π must be irrational. I know you’ll all trust me on that argument, but I wouldn’t want to sell it to a bright child.
Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 4th of March, 2017. I feel bad that I completely forgot Carl had a kid and that the face on the x doesn’t help me remember anything.
Holbrook continues the thread on the 4th, extends the anthropomorphic-mathematics-stuff to call people variables. There’s ways that this is fair. We use a variable for a number whose value we don’t know or don’t care about. A “random variable” is one that could take on any of a set of values. We don’t know which one it does, in any particular case. But we do know — or we can find out — how likely each of the possible values is. We can use this to understand the behavior of systems even if we never actually know what any one of it does. You see how I’m going to defend this metaphor, then, especially if we allow that what people are likely or unlikely to do will depend on context and evolve in time.
is close to what one would write for the Fourier transformation of the function named l. It would need to be more like 
and even then it wouldn’t be quite done. So I guess Litzler used some actual reference but only copied as much as worked for the composition. (Which is not a problem, of course. The mathematics has no role in this strip beyond its visual appeal, so only the part that looks good needs to be there.) The Fourier transform’s a commonly-used trick; among many things, it lets us replace differential equations (hard, but instructive, and everywhere) with polynomials (comfortable and familiar and well-understood). Finally among the not-quite-comment-worthy is 
times the square of the length of any side. It can have a rational side and an irrational area, or vice-versa. Just as the circle has. If it’s not an equilateral triangle? 
an easy problem to solve? 
nebusresearch 
