Reading the Comics, November 29, 2018: Closing Out November Edition

Today, I get to wrap up November’s suggested discussion topics as prepared by Comic Strip Master Command.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th mentions along its way the Liar Paradox and Zeno’s Paradoxes. Both are ancient problems. The paradoxes arise from thinking with care and rigor about things we seem to understand intuitively. For the Liar Paradox it’s about what we mean to declare a statement true or false. For Zeno’s Paradoxes it’s about whether we think space (and time) are continuous or discrete. And, as the strip demonstrates, there is a particular kind of nerd that declares the obvious answer is the only possible answer and that it’s foolish to think deeper. To answer a question’s literal words while avoiding its point is a grand old comic tradition, of course, predating even the antijoke about chickens crossing roads. Which is what gives these answers the air of an old stage comedian.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th of November, 2018. Other essays mentioning topics raised by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link. Well, all right, this link, if you want to avoid the maybe four times it hasn’t turned up.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 28th features a cameo for mathematics. At least mathematics class. It’s painted as the most tedious part of the school day. I’m not sure this is quite right for Lio as a character. He’s clever in a way that I think harmonizes well with how mathematics brings out universal truths. But there is a difference between mathematics and mathematics class, of course.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 28th of November, 2018. Essays discussing topics raised by Lio should be at this link.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2am for the 28th shows how well my resolution to drop the strip from my rotation here has gone. I don’t seem to have found it worthy of mention before, though. It plays on the difference between a note of money, the number of units of currency that note represents, and between “zero” and “nothing”. Also I’m enchanted now by the idea that maybe some government might publish a zero-dollar bill. At least for the sake of movie and television productions that need realistic-looking cash.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2am rerun for the 28th of November, 2018. It first appeared the 12th of April, 2000. Other instances of Randolph Itch, 2 am that I thought worth discussing are at this link.

In the footer joke Randolph mentions how you can never have enough zeroes. Yes, but I’d say that’s true of twenties, too. There is a neat sense in which this is true for working mathematicians, though. At least for those doing analysis. One of the reliable tricks that we learn to do in analysis is to “add zero” to a quantity. This is, literally, going from some expression that might be, say, “a – b” to “a + 0 – b”, which of course has the same value. The point of doing that is that we know other things equal to zero. For example, for any number L, “-L + L” is zero. So we get the original expression from “a + 0 – b” over to “a – L + L – b”. And that becomes useful is you picked L so that you know something about “a – L” and about “L – b”. Because then it tells you something about “a – b” that you didn’t know before. Picking that L, and showing something true about “a – L” and “L – b”, is the tricky part.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 29th of November, 2018. Other appearances by Looks Good On Paper should be at this link.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 29th is back with another Möbius Strip comic strip. Last time it was presented as the “Möbius Trip”, a looping journey. This time it’s a comic strip proper. If this particular Looks Good On Paper has run before I don’t seem to have mentioned it. Unlike the “Möbius Trip” comic, this one looks more clearly like it actually is a Möbius strip.

The Dumpties in the comic strip are presented as getting nauseated at the strange curling around. It’s good sense for the comic-in-the-comic, which just has to have something happen and doesn’t really need to make sense. But there is no real way to answer where a Möbius strip wraps around itself. I mean, we can declare it’s at the left and right ends of the strip as we hold it, sure. But this is an ad hoc placement. We can roll the belt along a little bit, not changing its shape, but changing the points where we think of the strip as turning over.

But suppose you were a flat creature, wandering a Möbius strip. Would you have any way to tell that you weren’t on the plane? You could, but it takes some subtle work. Like, you could try drawing shapes. These let you count a thing called the Euler Characteristic, which relates the numer of vertices, edges, and faces of a polyhedron. The Euler Characteristic for a Möbius strip is the same as that for a Klein bottle, a cylinder, or a torus. You could try drawing regions, and coloring them in, calling on the four-color map theorem. (Here I want just to mention the five-color map theorem, which is as these things go easy to prove.) A map on the plane needs at most four colors to have no neighboring territories share a color along an edge. (Territories here are contiguous, and we don’t count territories meeting at only a point as sharing an edge.) Same for a sphere, which is good for we folks who have the job of coloring in both globes and atlases. It’s also the same for a cylinder. On a Möbius strip, this number is six. On a torus, it’s seven. So we could tell, if we were on a Möbius strip, that we were. It can be subtle to prove, is all.

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All of my regular Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link. The next in my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z glossary should be posted Tuesday. I’m glad for it if you do come around and read again.

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Reading the Comics, September 22, 2018: Last Chance Edition

I plan tomorrow to have another of my Mathematics A To Z posts. This weekend I’ll publish this month’s Playful Mathematics Blog Carnival. So if you’ve seen any web site, blog, video, podcast, or other reference that had something that delighted and taught you something, this is your last chance to let me know, and let my audience know about it. Please leave a comment if you know about anything I ought to see. Thank you.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 20th is a numerals and a wordplay joke. It is not hard to make numerals tattooed on a person an alarming thing. But when done with (I trust) the person’s consent, and done whimsically like this, it’s more a slightly odd bit of play.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 20th of September, 2018. It … seems a little out of the usual run of Lio‘s sense of humor, but then I don’t know where else Tatulli could have used the joke.

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 21st is ultimately a strip about motivating someone to learn arithmetic. Agnes’s reasoning is sound, though. If the only reason to learn this unpleasant chore is because your job may need it, why not look at another job? We wouldn’t try to convince someone who didn’t want to learn French that they’ll need it for their job as … a tour guide in Quebec? There’s plenty of work that doesn’t need that. I suspect kids don’t buy “this is good for your future job” as a reason. Even if it were, general education should not be job training either.

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 21st of September, 2018. Agnes doesn’t pursue being a mortician, at least this time, and instead tries out keeping a journal.

Juba’s Viivi and Wagner for the 21st gives Wagner a short-lived ambition to be a wandering mathematician. The abacus serves as badge of office. There are times and places that his ambition wouldn’t be completely absurd. Before the advent of electric and electronic computing, people who could calculate were worth hiring for their arithmetic. In 18th Century London there was a culture of “penny universities”, people with academic training making a living by giving lectures and courses to whatever members of the public cared to come to their talk, often in coffee-houses or barns.

Juba’s Viivi and Wagner for the 21st of September, 2018. This puts me in mind of a Peanuts where Sally Brown wondered about what if their father lost their job. What could she do to help the family earn its living? She suggested: she could make her bed.

Mathematicians learn that there used to be public spectacles, mathematicians challenging one another to do problems, with real cash or jobs on the line. They learn this because one such challenge figures in to the story of Gerolamo Cardano and Niccolò Fontana, known as Tartaglia. It’s about how we learned formulas to solve some kinds of polynomials. You may sense uncertainty in my claim there. It’s because it turns out it’s hard to find clear records of this sort of challenge outside the Cardano-Tartaglia match. That isn’t to say these things weren’t common. It’s just that I’ve been slowly learning to be careful about my claims.

(I’m aided here by a startling pair of episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast. This pair — “Trivial Pursuits: Fourteenth Century Logic” and “Sara Uckleman on Obligations” — describe a fascinating logic game that sounds like it would still be a great party game, for which there’s numerous commentaries and rule sets and descriptions of how to play. But no records of people actually ever playing it, or talking about games they had played, or complaining about being cheated out of a win or stuff like that. It’s a strong reminder to look closely at what your evidence does support.)

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 22nd of September, 2018. So do you think the father is really into the luchador show in the last panel or is he just going along with this while his kid comes to hate promises of fun?

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 22nd is the comforting return of Zach Weinersmith to these essays. And yes, it’s horrible parenting to promise something fun and have it turn out to be a mathematics lecture, but that’s part of the joke.

Karl Weierstrass was a real person, and a great mathematician best known for giving us a good, rigorous idea of what a limit is. We need limits because, besides their being nice things to have, calculus depends on them. At least, calculus depends on thinking about calculations on infinitely many things. Or on things infinitesimally small. Trying to do this works pretty well, much of the time. But you can also start calculating like this and get nonsense. How to tell whether your particular calculation works out or is nonsense?

Weierstrass worked out a good, rigorous idea for what we mean by a limit. It mostly tracks with what we’d intuitively expect. And it avoids all the dangerous spots we’ve noticed so far. Particularly, it doesn’t require us to ever look at anything that’s infinitely vast, or infinitesimally small. Anything we calculate on is done with regular arithmetic, that we’re quite confident in. But it lets us draw conclusions about the infinitely numerous or tiny. It’s brilliant work. When it’s presented to someone in the start of calculus, it leaves them completely baffled but they can maybe follow along with the rules. When it’s presented to mathematics majors in real analysis, it leaves them largely baffled but they can maybe follow along with the reasons. Somewhere around grad school I got comfortable with it, even excited. Weierstrass’s sort of definition turns up all over the place in real and in functional analysis. So at the least you get very comfortable with it.

So it is part of Weinersmith’s joke that this is way above that kid’s class level. As a joke, that fails for me. The luchador might as well be talking complete nonsense and the kid would realize that right away. There’s not the threat that this is something he ought to be able to understand. But it will probably always be funny to imagine mathematician wrestlers. Can count on that. I didn’t mean that as a joke, but you’ll notice I’m letting it stand.

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And with that, you know what I figure to post on Sunday. It and my other Reading the Comics posts should be at this tag. Other appearances of Lio should be at this link. The mentions of Agnes should be at this link. Essays with some mention of Viivi and Wagner will be at this link, although it’s a new tag, so who knows how long it’ll take for the next to appear? And other essays with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal will be at this link when there’s any to mention.

Reading the Comics, March 5, 2018: If It’s Even Mathematics Edition

Many of the strips from the first half of last week are ones that just barely touch on mathematical content. I’m not sure how relevant they all are. I hope you like encountering them anyway.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 4th of March offers “an infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar” as a joke’s setup. Mathematics popularizers have a small set of jokes about infinite numbers of mathematicians, often arriving at hotels. They’re used to talk about how we now understand infinitely large sets. There’s often counter-intuitive or just plain weird results that follow. And presenting it as a joke works surprisingly well in introducing the ideas. There’s a kind of joke that is essentially a tall tale, spinning out an initial premise to as far and as absurd a consequence as you can get. In structure, that’s not much different to a proof, a discussion of the consequences of an idea. It’s a shame that it’s hard to make jokes or anecdotes about more fields of mathematics. Somehow infinitely large groups of people are funnier than, say, upper-bounded nondecreasing sequences.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 4th of March, 2018. You know, it’s kind of a peculiar thing that Zippy the Pinhead is a syndicated daily newspaper comic strip, isn’t it? I’m glad we live in a world strange enough for this to be the case.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 4th has a bit of fraction-based wordplay. I’m not sure how mathematical this is, but I grinned.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 4th has Jason try to make a “universal” loot box that consists of zeroes and ones. As he says, accumulate enough and put them in the right order and you have any digital prize imaginable. Implementation is, as joked, the problem. Assembling ones and zeroes at random isn’t likely to turn up anything you might care about in a reasonable time. (It’s the monkeys-at-typewriters problem.) If you know how to assemble ones and zeroes to get what you want, well, what do you need Jason’s boxes for? As with most clever ideas by computer-oriented boys it shouldn’t really be listened to.

Mark Pett’s Lucky Cow rerun for the 4th has Neil make an order-of-magnitude error estimating what animal power can do. We’ve all made them. They’re particularly easy to make when switching the unit measure. Trying to go from meters to kilometers and multiplying the distance by a thousand, say. Which is annoying since often it’s easiest to estimate the order of magnitude of something first. I can’t find easily an estimate of how many calories a hamster eats over the course of the day. That seems like it would give an idea of how much energy a hamster could possibly be expected to provide, and so work out whether the estimate of four million hamsters to power a car is itself plausible. If someone has information, I’d take it.

Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic for the 4th is a Rubik’s Cube joke. Also a random processes joke. If a blender could turn the faces of a cube, and could turn them randomly, and could run the right period of time … well, yeah, it could unscramble a cube. But see the previous talk about Jason Fox and the delivery of ones and zeroes.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 5th is a solid geometry joke. I’ve put more thought into whether and where to put hyphens in the last three words of that sentence than is worth it.

Steve Sicula’s Home and Away rerun for the 6th has the father and son happily doing some mathematics. It’s in the service of better gambling on sports. But at least they know why they would like to do these calculations.

Reading the Comics, October 7, 2017: Rerun Comics Edition

The most interesting mathematically-themed comic strips from last week were also reruns. So be it; at least I have an excuse to show a 1931-vintage comic. Also, after discovering my old theme didn’t show the category of essay I was posting, I did literally minutes of search for a new theme that did. And that showed tags. And that didn’t put a weird color behind LaTeX inline equations. So I’m using the same theme as my humor blog does, albeit with a different typeface, and we’ll hope that means I don’t post stuff to the wrong blog. As it is I start posting something to the wrong place about once every twenty times. All I want is a WordPress theme with all the good traits of the themes I look at and none of the drawbacks; why is that so hard to get?

Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre rerun for the 25th of April, 1931, and rerun the 5th of October, 2017. No, Kabibble Kabaret is not actually a joke and yes, it’s always like that, and no, I have no idea why Comics Kingdom includes these footers. I find them fascinating in their badness, but, yeah.

Elzie Segar’s Thimble Theatre rerun for the 5th originally ran the 25th of April, 1931. It’s just a joke about Popeye not being good at bookkeeping. In the story, Popeye’s taking the $50,000 reward from his last adventure and opened a One-Way Bank, giving people whatever money they say they need. And now you understand how the first panel of the last row has several jokes in it. The strip is partly a joke about Popeye being better with stuff he can hit than anything else, of course. I wonder if there’s an old stereotype of sailors being bad at arithmetic. I remember reading about pirate crews that, for example, not-as-canny-as-they-think sailors would demand a fortieth or a fiftieth of the prizes as their pay, instead of a mere thirtieth. But it’s so hard to tell what really happened and what’s just a story about the stupidity of people. Marginal? Maybe, but I’m a Popeye fan and this is my blog, so there.

Bill Rechin’s Crock rerun(?) from the 6th must have come before. I don’t know when. Anyway it’s a joke about mathematics being way above everybody’s head.

Bill Rechin’s Crock from the 6th of October, 2017. Yeah, I don’t exactly get the vulture as a pack animal either, but it’s kind of a cute idea. Or I’m a soft touch for cartoon and comic strip vultures. I would like to identify the characters but I forget their names and Wikipedia and the official Comics Kingdom site don’t give me any help.

Norm Feuti’s Gil rerun for the 6th is a subverted word problem joke. And it’s a reminder of how hard story problems can be. You need something that has a mathematics question on point. And the question has to be framed as asking something someone would actually care to learn. Plus the story has to make sense. Much easier when you’re teaching calculus, I think.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 6th is a playing-stupid joke built in percentages. Cute enough for the time it takes to read.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 6th is a parent-can’t-help-with-homework joke, done with arithmetic since it’s hard to figure another subject that would make the joke possible. I suppose a spelling assignment could be made to work. But that would be hard to write so it didn’t seem contrived.

Thaves’ Frank and Ernest for the 7th feels like it’s a riff on the old saw about Plato’s Academy. (The young royal sent home with a coin because he asked what the use of this instruction was, and since he must get something from everything, here’s his drachma.) Maybe. Or it’s just the joke that you make if you have “division” and “royals” in mind.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 7th is not quite the anthropomorphic symbols joke for this past week. It’s circling that territory, though.