## Reading the Comics, May 15, 2020: Squared Away Edition

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 $1 \pm 2$. 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 $\frac32 \pm \frac12$.

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.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 13th features the rounding-up-sheep joke.

Gary Larson’s The Far Side strips for the 14th includes the famous one of Albert Einstein coming so close to working out $E = mc^2$. The usual derivations for $E = mc^2$ 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 $E = mc^2$ 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 $E = mc^3$, rejected it, and then tried it again. This is also a common pattern of discovery.

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 14th has a vague recollection of the Pythagorean Theorem be all that someone says he remembers of mathematics.

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.

This wraps up the past week’s mathematically-themed comics. Read this and next week’s comic strips at this link. Thank you.

## Reading the Comics, April 13, 2020: More Words At Play Edition

Now at last I turn to last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. They weren’t very deeply mathematical, I think. But I always think that right before I turn out a 2,000-word essay about some kid giving a snarky answer to an arithmetic problem.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 11th has a casual mention of mathematical physics. The description of the strength of the gravitational force between two masses is one of the simplest interesting physics equations that you’ll see.

Rudolph Dirks’s Katzenjammer Kids vintage rerun for the 12th is a slightly hard-to-read joke about the association between rabbits and multiplication and reproduction. There is a neat reference in the first panel to being smart enough to do multiplication without a slide rule.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 12th has Ruthie try to teach her brother about number words. What Ruthie seems to be struggling with is the difference between a number and the name we give a number. The distinction between a thing and the name of a thing can be a tricky one, and I do remember being confused at the difference between the word “four” and the concept “four”. What I don’t remember, to my regret, is what thought I had which made the difference clear.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 12th is a set of mathematically-themed puns and other wordplay.

Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 13th is an anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals for the 13th is a rerun, of course; Turner died several years ago. It’s a bit of wordplay based on the assonance between “ratio” and “racial”, and I had thought I’d already discussed this strip so far as it needed discussion. I was mistaken: Turner used the same idea for a strip the 24th of June, 2015, but it’s a different joke.

There are a couple more comic strips of mention. I’ll get to them soon. Thanks for reading.

## Reading the Comics, July 20, 2019: Heat Wave Marginalia Edition

So, it has been hot around here. Extremely hot. Like, hot to the point that there’s nothing to do but form hyperbolic statements about the heat. This does not help anyone feel cooler, but it does help us feel like we’re doing something relevant to the weather. The result is that I haven’t had time to think about my comic strip reading. I’ve been very busy trying to pop my head off and leave it in the freezer. This has not worked. Our refrigerator’s dying and we have a replacement scheduled to arrive this week.

The consequence is that I haven’t had time to write my paragraphs about the comic strips that mention mathematical issues of substance. To not be a complete void, though, let me give you the marginalia. These are the comics that mentioned mathematics in some way so slight that I don’t think them worth further discussion. I’ll get to substantial stuff Tuesday. Thank you.

Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 15th has a kid doing remarkably well in a mathematics exam. It’s treated as extraordinary. This is the traditional use of mathematics as the hard subject.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 7th of March, 1932, and reprinted the 16th of July has Skippy talk about arithmetic lessons. Here, again, it could be any subject, but mathematics has the reputation for being a subject one wants to avoid.

Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes from a Multiverse rerun for the 17th shows off a girl talking about her father’s ability to help with mathematics homework. There is a theme developing in the past week’s mentions.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 17th has a ‘Fake Maths’ textbook, the falseness of it proven by the arithmetic being wrong. So that uses a different part of mathematics’ reputation, that of giving us things we can know are certainly true, or certainly false.

The weather should be much nicer the next few days. Trusting that it is, I’ll have an essay at this link Tuesday with a new Reading the Comics post. Thank you for understanding. It’s quite hard to do anything when it’s so hot you realize your couch is melting.

## Reading the Comics, August 8, 2018: Hm Edition

There are times I feel like my writing here collapses entirely to Reading the Comics posts. It’s a temptation to just give up doing anything else. They’re easy to write, since the comics give me the subjects to discuss. And it offers a nice, accessible mix of same-old topics with the occasional oddball. It’s fun. But sometimes Comic Strip Master Command decides I’ve been doing enough of that. This is one of those weeks; I only found six comics in my normal reading that were on point enough to discuss. So here’s half of them.

Bill Rechin’s Crock for the 6th is … hm. Well, let’s call it a fractions joke. I’m curious exactly what the clerk’s joke is supposed to mean. Is it intended to suggest an impossibility, putting into something far more than it can hold? Or is it just meant to suggest gross overabundance? And deep down I suspect Rechin didn’t have any specific meaning; it’s just a good-sounding insult.

Hector D Cantu and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 7th is … hm. Well, let’s call it a wordplay joke. It works by “strength” having multiple meanings, and “numbers” having multiple meanings. And there being a convenient saying to link one to the other. If this were a busier week I wouldn’t even bring it up, but I hate going without anything around here.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 8th is … hm. Well, let’s call it a Roman numerals joke. It’s really more wordplay. And one I like, although the pacing is off. The second panel could be usefully dropped, and you could probably redo this all in two panels — or one — to better effect.

They’ve been phasing Roman Numerals out for a long while. Arabic numerals got their grand introduction to the (Western) Roman Empire’s territories in 1202 by Leonardo of Pisa, known now as “Fibonacci”. His Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) laid out the Arabic numerals scheme and place values, and how to use them. By 1228 he published an edition comparing Roman numerals to Arabic numerals.

This wasn’t the first anyone in western Europe had heard of them, mind. (It never is; anyone telling you anything was the first is simplifying.) Spanish monks in the 10th century studied Arabic texts, and wrote about what they found. But after Leonardo of Pisa, Arabic numerals started displacing Roman numerals at least in specialized trades. Florence, in what is now Italy, prohibited merchants from using Arabic numerals in 1299; they could use Roman numerals or write them out in words. This, presumably, to prevent cheating by use of strange, unfamiliar calculus. Arabic numerals escaped being tools of specialists in the 16th century, thanks in large part to the German mathematician Adam Ries, who explained the scheme in terms apprentices could understand.

Still, these days, a Roman numeral is mostly an affectation. Useful for bit of style; not for serious mathematics. Good for watches.

Well. I keep all my Reading the Comics essays tagged so that you can read them at this link. Other essays that mention Crock should be available at this link. If you’re more interested in Baldo other essays mentioning it should be here. And other Lard’s World Peace Tips, when they inspire mathematical thoughts, are available at this link. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Reading the Comics, March 10, 2018: I Will Get To Pi Day Edition

There were fewer Pi Day comic strips than I had expected for this year. It’s gotten much more public mention than I had expected a pop-mathematics bit of whimsy might. But I’m still working off last week’s strips; I’ll get to this week’s next week. This makes sense to me, which is as good as making sense at all.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 7th is a percentages joke, as applied to hair. Lard doesn’t seem clear whether this would be 10% off the hair by individual strand length or by total volume. Either way, Lard’s right to wonder about the accuracy.

Mark Pett’s Mr Lowe rerun for the 7th is a standardized test joke. Part of the premise of Pett’s strip is that Mister Lowe is a brand-new teacher, which is why he makes mistakes like this problem. (This is touchy to me, as in grad school I hoped to make some spare money selling questions to a standardized testing company. I wasn’t good enough at it, and ultimately didn’t have the time to train up to their needs.) A multiple-choice question needs to clear and concise and to have one clearly best answer. As the given question’s worded, though, I could accept ‘2’ or ’12’ as a correct answer. With a bit of experience Lowe would probably clarify that Tommy and Suzie are getting the same number of apples and that together they should have 20 total.

Then on the 9th Mr Lowe has a joke about cultural bias in standardized tests. It uses an arithmetic problem as the type case. Mathematicians like to think of themselves as working in a universal, culturally independent subject. I suppose it is, but only in ways that aren’t interesting: if you suppose these rules of logic and these axioms and these definitions then these results follow, and it doesn’t matter who does the supposing. But start filtering that by stuff people care about, such as the time it takes for two travelling parties to meet, and you’ve got cultural influence. (Back when this strip was new the idea that a mathematics exam could be culturally biased was a fresh new topic of mockery among people who don’t pay much attention to the problems of teaching but who know what those who do are doing wrong.)

Ralph Hagen’s The Barn for the 8th — a new tag for my comics, by the way — lists a bunch of calculation tools and techniques as “obsolete” items. I’m assuming Rory means that longhand multiplication is obsolete. I’m not sure that it is, but I have an unusual perspective on this.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 8th is an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. I was annoyed when I first read this because I thought, wait, 97 isn’t a prime number. It is, of course. I have no explanation for my blunder.

Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes from a Multiverse has restarted its run on GoComics. The strip for the 8th is a riff on Venn Diagrams. And, it seems to me, about those logic-bomb problems about sets consisting of sets that don’t contain themselves and the like. You get weird and apparently self-destructive results pondering that stuff. The last time GoComics ran the Scenes from a Multiverse series I did not appreciate right away that there were many continuing stories. There might be follow-ups to this Former Venn Prime Universe story.

Brian Fies’s The Last Mechanical Monster for the 9th has the Mad Scientist, struggling his way into the climax of the story, testing his mind by calculating a Fibonacci Sequence. Whatever keeps you engaged and going. You can build a Fibonacci Sequence from any two starting terms. Each term after the first two is the sum of the previous two. If someone just says “the Fibonacci Sequence” they mean the sequence that starts with 0, 1, or perhaps with 1, 1. (There’s no interesting difference.) Fibonacci Sequences were introduced to the west by Leonardo of Pisa, who did so much to introduce Hindu-Arabic Numerals to a Europe that didn’t know it wanted this stuff. They touch on some fascinating stuff: the probability of not getting two tails in a row of a set number of coin tosses. Chebyshev polynomials. Diophantine equations. They also touch on the Golden Ratio, which isn’t at all important but that people like.

Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship for the 9th just has a blackboard of arithmetic to stand in for schoolwork.

## Reading the Comics, November 8, 2017: Uses Of Mathematics Edition

Was there an uptick in mathematics-themed comic strips in the syndicated comics this past week? It depends how tight a definition of “theme” you use. I have enough to write about that I’m splitting the week’s load. And I’ve got a follow-up to that Wronski post the other day, so I’m feeling nice and full of content right now. So here goes.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal posted the 5th gets my week off to an annoying start. Science and mathematics and engineering people have a tendency to be smug about their subjects. And to see aptitude or interest in their subjects as virtue, or at least intelligence. (If they see a distinction between virtue and intelligence.) To presume that an interest in the field I like is a demonstration of intelligence is a pretty nasty and arrogant move.

And yes, I also dislike the attitude that school should be about training people. Teaching should be about letting people be literate with the great thoughts people have had. Mathematics has a privileged spot here. The field, as we’ve developed it, seems to build on human aptitudes for number and space. It’s easy to find useful sides to it. Doesn’t mean it’s vocational training.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate on the 6th discovered mathematics puzzles. And this gave him the desire to create a new mathematical puzzle that he would use to get rich. Good luck with that. Coming up with interesting enough recreational mathematics puzzles is hard. Presenting it in a way that people will buy is another, possibly greater, challenge. It takes luck and timing and presentation, just as getting a hit song does. Sudoku, for example, spent five years in the Dell Magazine puzzle books before getting a foothold in Japanese newspapers. And then twenty years there before being noticed in the English-speaking puzzle world. Big Nate’s teacher tries to encourage him, although that doesn’t go as Mr Staples might have hoped. (The storyline continues to the 11th. Spoiler: Nate does not invent the next great recreational mathematics puzzle.)

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 7th start out in a mathematics class, at least. I suppose the mathematical content doesn’t matter, though. Mallett’s making a point about questions that, I confess, I’m not sure I get. I’ll leave it for wiser heads to understand.

Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 8th is a subverted word-problem joke. And I suppose a reminder about the need for word problems to parse as things people would do, or might be interested in. I can’t go along with characterizing buying twelve candy bars “gluttonous” though. Not if they’re in a pack of twelve or something like that. I may be unfair to Grand Avenue. Mind, until a few years ago I was large enough my main method of getting around was “being rolled by Oompa-Loompas”, so I could be a poor judge.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 8th does a rounding joke. It’s not much, but I’ve included appearances of this joke before and it seems unfair to skip it this time.

## Reading the Comics, October 14, 2017: Physics Equations Edition

So that busy Saturday I promised for the mathematically-themed comic strips? Here it is, along with a Friday that reached the lowest non-zero levels of activity.

Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine for the 13th is one of those equations-of-everything jokes. Naturally it features a panel full of symbols that, to my eye, don’t parse. There are what look like syntax errors, for example, with the one that anyone could see the { mark that isn’t balanced by a }. But when someone works rough they will, often, write stuff that doesn’t quite parse. Think of it as an artist’s rough sketch of a complicated scene: the lines and anatomy may be gibberish, but if the major lines of the composition are right then all is well.

Most attempts to write an equation for everything are really about writing a description of the fundamental forces of nature. We trust that it’s possible to go from a description of how gravity and electromagnetism and the nuclear forces go to, ultimately, a description of why chemistry should work and why ecologies should form and there should be societies. There are, as you might imagine, a number of assumed steps along the way. I would accept the idea that we’ll have a unification of the fundamental forces of physics this century. I’m not sure I would believe having all the steps between the fundamental forces and, say, how nerve cells develop worked out in that time.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons makes it overdue appearance for the week on the 14th, with a chalkboard word-problem joke. Amusing enough. And estimating an answer, getting it wrong, and refining it is good mathematics. It’s not just numerical mathematics that will look for an approximate solution and then refine it. As a first approximation, 15 minus 7 isn’t far off 10. And for mental arithmetic approximating 15 minus 7 as 10 is quite justifiable. It could be made more precise if a more exact answer were needed.

Maria Scrivan’s Half Full for the 14th I’m going to call the anthropomorphic geometry joke for the week. If it’s not then it’s just wordplay and I’d have no business including it here.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 14th tosses in the formula describing how strong the force of gravity between two objects is. In Newtonian gravity, which is why it’s the Newton Police. It’s close enough for most purposes. I’m not sure how this supports the cause of world peace.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th names Riemann’s Quaternary Conjecture. I was taken in by the panel, trying to work out what the proposed conjecture could even mean. The reason it works is that Bernhard Riemann wrote like 150,000 major works in every field of mathematics, and about 149,000 of them are big, important foundational works. The most important Riemann conjecture would be the one about zeroes of the Riemann Zeta function. This is typically called the Riemann Hypothesis. But someone could probably write a book just listing the stuff named for Riemann, and that’s got to include a bunch of very specific conjectures.

## Reading the Comics, July 8, 2017: Mostly Just Pointing Edition

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.

Ralph Dunagin and Dana Summers’s Middletons for the 2nd uses mathematics as the example of the course a kid might do lousy in. You never see this for Social Studies classes, do you?

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.)

Mark Pett’s Lucky Cow rerun for the 4th is another use of mathematics, here algebra, as a default sort of homework assignment.

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.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 5th is a Special Relativity joke, which is plenty of mathematical content for me. I warned you it was a week of not particularly deep discussions.

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.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 7th mentions fractions, so you can see how loose the standards get around here when the week is slow enough.

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.

## Reading the Comics, May 2, 2017: Puzzle Week

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.

## Reading the Comics, March 18, 2017: Pi Day Edition

No surprise what the recurring theme for this set of mathematics-mentioning comic strips is. Look at the date range. But here goes.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie rerun for the 13th uses algebra as the thing that will stun a class into silence. I know the silence. As a grad student you get whole minutes of instructions on how to teach a course before being sent out as recitation section leader for some professor. And what you do get told is the importance of asking students their thoughts and their ideas. This maybe works in courses that are obviously friendly to opinions or partially formed ideas. But in Freshman Calculus? It’s just deadly. Even if you can draw someone into offering an idea how we might start calculating a limit (say), they’re either going to be exactly right or they’re going to need a lot of help coaxing the idea into something usable. I’d like to have more chatty classes, but some subjects are just hard to chat about.

Steve Skelton’s 2 Cows And A Chicken for the 13th includes some casual talk about probability. As normally happens, they figure the chances are about 50-50. I think that’s a default estimate of the probability of something. If you have no evidence to suppose one outcome is more likely than the other, then that is a reason to suppose the chance of something is 50 percent. This is the Bayesian approach to probability, in which we rate things as more or less likely based on what information we have about how often they turn out. It’s a practical way of saying what we mean by the probability of something. It’s terrible if we don’t have much reliable information, though. We need to fall back on reasoning about what is likely and what is not to save us in that case.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater lead off the Pi Day jokes with an anthropomorphic numerals panel. This is because I read most of the daily comics in alphabetical order by title. It is also because The Argyle Sweater is The Argyle Sweater. Among π’s famous traits is that it goes on forever, in decimal representations, yes. That’s not by itself extraordinary; dull numbers like one-third do that too. (Arguably, even a number like ‘2’ does, if you write all the zeroes in past the decimal point.) π gets to be interesting because it goes on forever without repeating, and without having a pattern easily describable. Also because it’s probably a normal number but we don’t actually know that for sure yet.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark panel for the 14th is another anthropomorphic numerals joke and nearly the same joke as above. The answer, dear numeral, is “chained tweets”. I do not know that there’s a Twitter bot posting the digits of π in an enormous chained Twitter feed. But there’s a Twitter bot posting the digits of π in an enormous chained Twitter feed. If there isn’t, there is now.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 14th is your basic Pi Day Wordplay panel. I think there were a few more along these lines but I didn’t record all of them. This strip will serve for them all, since it’s drawn from an appealing camera angle to give the joke life.

Dave Blazek’s Loose Parts for the 14th is a mathematics wordplay panel but it hasn’t got anything to do with π. I suspect he lost track of what days he was working on, back six or so weeks when his deadline arrived.

Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips for the 15th is some sort of joke about the probability of the world being like what it seems to be. I’m not sure precisely what anyone is hoping to express here or how it ties in to world peace. But the world does seem to be extremely well described by techniques that suppose it to be random and unpredictable in detail. It is extremely well predictable in the main, which shows something weird about the workings of the world. It seems to be doing all right for itself.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 15th is built on the staggering idea that the Earth might be the only place with life in the universe. The cosmos is a good stand-in for infinitely large things. It might be better as a way to understand the infinitely large than actual infinity would be. Somehow thinking of the number of stars (or whatnot) in the universe and writing out a representable number inspires an understanding for bigness that the word “infinity” or the symbols we have for it somehow don’t seem to, at least to me.

Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler’s TruthFacts for the 17th gives us valuable information about how long ahead of time the comic strips are working. Arithmetic is probably the easiest thing to use if one needs an example of a fact. But even “2 + 2 = 4” is a fact only if we accept certain ideas about what we mean by “2” and “+” and “=” and “4”. That we use those definitions instead of others is a reflection of what we find interesting or useful or attractive. There is cultural artifice behind the labelling of this equation as a fact.

Jimmy Johnson’s Arlo and Janis for the 18th capped off a week of trying to explain some point about the compression and dilution of time in comic strips. Comic strips use space and time to suggest more complete stories than they actually tell. They’re much like every other medium in this way. So, to symbolize deep thinking on a subject we get once again a panel full of mathematics. Yes, I noticed the misquoting of “E = mc2” there. I am not sure what Arlo means by “Remember the boat?” although thinking on it I think he did have a running daydream about living on a boat. Arlo and Janis isn’t a strongly story-driven comic strip, but Johnson is comfortable letting the setting evolve. Perhaps all this is forewarning that we’re going to jump ahead to a time in Arlo’s life when he has, or has had, a boat. I don’t know.