## Reading the Comics, June 10, 2017: Some Vintage Comics Edition

It’s too many comics to call this a famine edition, after last week’s feast. But there’s not a lot of theme to last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. There’s a couple that include vintage comic strips from before 1940, though, so let’s run with that as a title.

Glenn McCoy and Gary McCoy’s The Flying McCoys for the 4th of June is your traditional blackboard full of symbols to indicate serious and deep thought on a subject. It’s a silly subject, but that’s fine. The symbols look to me gibberish, but clown research will go along non-traditional paths, I suppose.

Bill Hinds’s Tank McNamara for the 4th is built on mathematics’ successful invasion and colonization of sports management. Analytics, sabermetrics, Moneyball, whatever you want to call it, is built on ideas not far removed from the quality control techniques that changed corporate management so. Look for patterns; look for correlations; look for the things that seem to predict other things. It seems bizarre, almost inhuman, that we might be able to think of football players as being all of a kind, that what we know about (say) one running back will tell us something about another. But if we put roughly similarly capable people through roughly similar training and set them to work in roughly similar conditions, then we start to see why they might perform similarly. Models can help us make better, more rational, choices.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals rerun for the 4th is another word-problem resistance joke. I suppose it’s also a reminder about the unspoken assumptions in a problem. It also points out why mathematicians end up speaking in an annoyingly precise manner. It’s an attempt to avoid being shown up like Oliver is.

Which wouldn’t help with Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 7th of April, 1930, and rerun the 5th. Skippy’s got a smooth line of patter to get out of his mother’s tutoring. You can see where Percy Crosby has the weird trait of drawing comics in 1930 that would make sense today still; few pre-World-War-II comics do.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 7th is a joke about mathematics anxiety. I don’t know that it actually explains anything, but, eh. I’m not sure there is a rational explanation for mathematics anxiety; if there were, I suppose it wouldn’t be anxiety.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 15th of July, 1939, and rerun the 8th, extends that odd little faintly word-problem-setup of the strips I mentioned the other day. I suppose identifying when two things moving at different speeds will intersect will always sound vaguely like a story problem.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am rerun for the 9th is about the sometimes-considered third possibility from a fair coin toss, and how to rig the results of that.

## Reading the Comics, June 3, 2017: Feast Week Conclusion Edition

And now finally I can close out last week’s many mathematically-themed comic strips. I had hoped to post this Thursday, but the Why Stuff Can Orbit supplemental took up my writing energies and eventually timeslot. This also ends up being the first time I’ve had one of Joe Martin’s comic strips since the Houston Chronicle ended its comics pages and I admit I’m not sure how I’m going to work this. I’m also not perfectly sure what the comic strip means.

So Joe Martin’s Mister Boffo for the 1st of June seems to be about a disastrous mathematics exam with a kid bad enough he hasn’t even got numbers exactly to express the score. Also I’m not sure there is a way to link to the strip I mean exactly; the archives for Martin’s strips are not … organized the way I would have done. Well, they’re his business.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 1st reruns the strip from the 1st of June, 1989. It’s your standard resisting-the-word-problem joke. On first reading the strip I didn’t get what the problem was asking for, and supposed that the text had garbled the problem, if there were an original problem. That was my sloppiness is all; it’s a perfectly solvable question once you actually read it.

J C Duffy’s Lug Nuts for the 1st — another day that threatened to be a Reading the Comics post all on its own — is a straggler Pi Day joke. It’s just some Dadaist clowning about.

Doug Bratton’s Pop Culture Shock Therapy for the 1st is a wordplay joke that uses word problems as emblematic of mathematics. I’m okay with that; much of the mathematics that people actually want to do amounts to extracting from a situation the things that are relevant and forming an equation based on that. This is what a word problem is supposed to teach us to do.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 1st — maybe I should have done a Reading the Comics for that day alone — riffs on the idle speculation that God would be a mathematician. It does this by showing a God uninterested in two logical problems. The first is the question of whether there’s an odd perfect number. Perfect numbers are these things that haunt number theory. (Everything haunts number theory.) It starts with idly noticing what happens if you pick a number, find the numbers that divide into it, and add those up. For example, 4 can be divided by 1 and 2; those add to 3. 5 can only be divided by 1; that adds to 1. 6 can be divided by 1, 2, and 3; those add to 6. For a perfect number the divisors add up to the original number. Perfect numbers look rare; for a thousand years or so only four of them (6, 28, 496, and 8128) were known to exist.

All the perfect numbers we know of are even. More, they’re all numbers that can be written as the product $2^{p - 1} \cdot \left(2^p - 1\right)$ for certain prime numbers ‘p’. (They’re the ones for which $2^p - 1$ is itself a prime number.) What we don’t know, and haven’t got a hint about proving, is whether there are any odd prime numbers. We know some things about odd perfect numbers, if they exist, the most notable of them being that they’ve got to be incredibly huge numbers, much larger than a googol, the standard idea of an incredibly huge number. Presumably an omniscient God would be able to tell whether there were an odd perfect number, or at least would be able to care whether there were. (It’s also not known if there are infinitely many perfect numbers, by the way. This reminds us that number theory is pretty much nothing but a bunch of easy-to-state problems that we can’t solve.)

Some miscellaneous other things we know about an odd perfect number, other than whether any exist: if there are odd perfect numbers, they’re not divisible by 105. They’re equal to one more than a whole multiple of 12. They’re also 117 more than a whole multiple of 468, and they’re 81 more than a whole multiple of 324. They’ve got to have at least 101 prime factors, and there have to be at least ten distinct prime factors. There have to be at least twelve distinct prime factors if 3 isn’t a factor of the odd perfect number. If this seems like a screwy list of things to know about a thing we don’t even know exists, then welcome to number theory.

The beard question I believe is a reference to the logician’s paradox. This is the one postulating a village in which the village barber shaves all, but only, the people who do not shave themselves. Given that, who shaves the barber? It’s an old joke, but if you take it seriously you learn something about the limits of what a system of logic can tell you about itself.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 2nd has Tiger’s arithmetic homework spill out into real life. This happens sometimes.

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat for the 10th of July, 1939 was rerun the 2nd of June. I’m not sure that it properly fits here, but the talk about Officer Pupp running at 60 miles per hour and Ignatz Mouse running forty and whether Pupp will catch Mouse sure reads like a word problem. Later strips in the sequence, including the ways that a tossed brick could hit someone who’d be running faster than it, did not change my mind about this. Plus I like Krazy Kat so I’ll take a flimsy excuse to feature it.