## Reading the Comics, February 14, 2020: Simple Edition

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 12th features some poor tutoring on Gunther’s part. Usually a person isn’t stuck for what the answer to a problem is; they’re stuck on how to do it correctly. Maybe on how to do it efficiently. But tutoring is itself a skill, and it’s a hard one to learn. We don’t get enough instruction in how to do it.

The problem Luann’s doing is one of simplifying an expression. I remember doing a lot of this, in middle school algebra like that. Simplifying expressions does not change their value; we don’t create new ideas by writing them. So why simplify?

Any grammatically correct expression for a concept may be as good as any other grammatically correct expression. This is as true in writing as it is in mathematics. So what is good writing? There are a thousand right answers. One trait that I think most good writing has is that it makes concepts feel newly accessible. It frames something in a way which makes ideas easier to see. So it is with simplifying algebraic expressions. Finding a version of a formula that makes clearer what you would like to do makes the formula more useful.

Simplifying like this, putting an expression into the fewest number of terms, is common. It typically makes it easier to calculate with a formula. We calculate with formulas all the time. It often makes it easier to compare one formula to another. We compare formulas some of the time. So we practice simplifying like this a lot. Occasionally we’ll have a problem where this simplification is counter-productive and we’d do better to write out something as, to make up an example, $4(x^2 + 2x + 1)^2 + 4(x^2 + 2x + 1) + 1$ instead. Someone who’s gotten good at simplifications, to the point it doesn’t take very much work, is likely to spot cases where one wants to keep part of the expression un-simplified.

Chen Weng’s Messycow Comics for the 13th starts off with some tut-tutting of lottery players. Objectively, yes, money put on a lottery ticket is wasted; even, for example, pick-three or pick-four daily games are so unlikely to pay any award as to be worth it. But I cannot make myself believe that this is necessarily a more foolish thing to do with a couple dollars than, say, buying a candy bar or downloading a song you won’t put on any playlists.

And as the Cow points out, the chance of financial success in art — in any creative field — is similarly ridiculously slight. Even skilled people need a stroke of luck to make it, and even then, making it is a marginal matter. (There is a reason I haven’t quit my job to support myself by blog-writing.) People are terrible at estimating probabilities, especially in situations that are even slightly complicated.

Hector D. Cantü and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 14th just has Gracie very enthusiastic for arithmetic class. It’s a cute bit.

And now I’m all caught up. Please check in this link next week as I read the comics for their mathematics content some more.

## Reading the Comics, November 7, 2019: The Casual Mentions Edition

As will sometimes happen it’s inconvenient for met to write up a paragraph or two on the particularly mathematically significant comic strips of the past week. Let me here share the comics that just mentioned mathematics, then, and save the heavy stuff for a bit later on.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes repeat for the 5th has Calvin seeking help with an arithmetic problem.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 6th — a repeat of Luann from the 6th of November, 1991 — sees Gunther thinking out walking to Luann’s house in the language of a word problem. It doesn’t help clear his thoughts.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 7th is the sudoku joke for the week.

Jeffrey Caulfield and Alexandre Rouillard’s Mustard and Boloney for the 7th uses a knowledge of mathematics as shorthand for general knowledge. The strip does misspell “Pythagorean”. This could be a slip on the cartoonists’ part that got past their editors too. Or it could be an extra joke on how often the know-it-all, really, does not. He’ll just talk a confident game long after everyone else has stopped really listening. (I’m a recovering know-it-all myself. I know how our kind thinks.) Or it might be trolling know-it-alls into correcting them.

And this covers things through to Friday’s comics. I write this not having had the chance to read Saturday’s yet. When I do, and when I have the whole week’s strips to discuss, I’ll have it at this link. Furthermore, this week sees the last quarter of the Fall 2019 A to Z under way. I’m excited to learn what I’m doing for the letter ‘U’ also.

## Reading the Comics, September 20, 2019: Quarters and Bunnies Edition

Norm Feuti’s Gil did not last long enough in syndication. This is a shame. The characters were great, the humor in a mode I like, and young Gil’s fascination with shows about the paranormal was eerily close to my own young self. But it didn’t last; my understanding is newspapers were reluctant to bring in a comic strip starring an impoverished family. This is a many-faceted shame, not least because the eternal tension between Gil’s fantasy life and his reality made it one of the few strips to reproduce the most vital element of Calvin and Hobbes. But Feuti decided to resume drawing Sunday strips, and I choose to include that in my Reading the Comics reading, because this is my blog and I can make the rules here, at least.

So here’s Norm Feuti’s Gil for the 15th. A couple days ago I saw someone amazed at finally learning where sunflower seeds come from. They’re the black part in the center of a sunflower, the part that makes the big yellow flower stand out in such contrast. People were giving the poster a hard time, asking, where did he think they came from? And the answer is just, he hadn’t thought about it. Why would he? It’s quite reasonable to go through life never encountering a sunflower seed except as a snack or as part of bird or squirrel food. Where on the sunflower plant it’d even be just doesn’t come up. If you want to make this a dire commentary on society losing its sense of where things come from, all right, I won’t stop you. But I think it’s more that there are a billion things to notice in the world, and so many things have names that are fanciful or allusive or ironic, that it’s normal not to realize that a phrase might literally represent its content.

So Gil having so associated a quarter with 25 cents, rather than one-fourth of a something, makes sense to me. (Especially given, as noted, that he and his mother are poor, and so he grows up attentive to cash.)

Isaac Asimov, prolific writer of cozy mysteries, had one short story built on the idea that a person might misremember 5:50, seen on a digital clock, as half-past five. I mention this to show how the difference between a quarter of a hundred of things, and the quarter of sixty things, will get mixed together.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 15th sees Luann struggling with algebra. And thinking of ways to at least get the answers. One advantage mathematics instructors have which many other subjects don’t is that you can create more problems easily. If for some reason $\frac{7x + 3}{x - 3}$ isn’t usable anymore, you can make it $\frac{7x + 5}{x - 5}$ and still be testing the same skills. But if you want to (as is reasonable) stick to what’s in a published text, yeah, you’re vulnerable to this.

And you can’t always just change a problem arbitrarily. For example, the expression in the second panel of the top row — $\frac{x^2 - 5x + 6}{x^2 + 5x + 4}$ — I notice factors into $\frac{(x - 3)(x - 2)}{(x + 4)(x + 1)}$. I don’t know the objective of Luann’s homework, but it would probably be messed up if the problem were just changed to $\frac{x^2 - 5x + 8}{x^2 + 5x + 3}$. Not that this couldn’t be worked, but that the work would involve annoying and complicated expressions instead of nice whole numbers or reasonable fractions.

Paul Trap’s Thatababy for the 15th presents Thatabay’s first counting-exponentially book, with the number of rabbits doubling every time. I admire the work Trap put in to drawing — in what we see here — 255 bunnies. I’m trusting there’s 128 in the last bunny panel; I’m not counting. At any rate he drew enough bunnies to not make it obvious to me where he repeats figures.

The traditional ever-increasing bunny spiral is the Fibonacci series. But in that, each panel would on average have only about three-fifths more bunnies than the one before it. That’s good, but it isn’t going to overwhelm as fast as the promise of 256 bunnies on the next page will.

Eric the Circle for the 17th, this by Griffenetsabine, has come up here before. That was back in October of 2013, though, so I don’t blame you for forgetting.

The “dual” here is a mathematical term. Many mathematical things have duals. Polyhedrons have a commonly defined dual shape, though. Start with a polyhedron like, oh, the cube. The dual is a new polyhedron. The vertices of the dual are at the centers of the faces of the original polyhedron. And if two faces of the original polyhedron meet at an edge, then there’s an edge connecting the vertices at the centers of those faces. If several faces meet at a vertex in the original polyhedron, then in the dual there’s a face connecting the vertices dual to the original faces. Work all this out and you get, as you might expect, that the shape that’s dual to a cube is the octahedron we’re told just walked into the bar. The dual to the octahedron, meanwhile … well, that is a cube, which is nice and orderly. You might get a bit of a smile working out what the dual to a tetrahedron is.

Duals are useful, generically, because usually if you can prove something about a dual then you can prove it about the original thing. And we may find that something is easier to prove for the dual than for the original. This isn’t guaranteed, especially for geometric shapes like this, where it’s hard to say that either shape is harder to work with than the other. But it’s one of the tools we have to try sliding between the problem we need to do and the problem we can do.

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 17th has claims about the usefulness of arithmetic. And Nancy skeptical of them, as you expect for a kid facing mathematics in a comic strip. I admit I’ve never needed to do much arithmetic when I cooked. The most would be figuring out how to adjust the cooking time when two things need very different temperatures. But I always do that by winging it. Now I’m curious whether there are good references for suggested alternate times.

I expect to have another Reading the Comics post here, on Monday. The A to Z series should pick up on Tuesday And I’m still glad for suggestions for the letters I through N. Thank you for reading.

## Reading the Comics, September 14, 2019: Friday the 13th Edition

The past week included another Friday the 13th. Several comic strips found that worth mention. So that gives me a theme by which to name this look over the comic strips.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts rerun for the 12th presents a pretty wordy algebra problem. And Peppermint Patty, in the grips of a math anxiety, freezing up and shutting down. One feels for her. Great long strings of words frighten anyone. The problem seems a bit complicated for kids Peppermint Patty’s and Franklin’s age. But the problem isn’t helping. One might notice, say, that a parent’s age will be some nice multiple of a child’s in a year or two. That in ten years a man’s age will be 14 greater than the combined age of their ages then? What imagination does that inspire?

Grant Peppermint Patty her fears. The situation isn’t hopeless. It helps to write out just what know, and what we would like to know. At least what we would like to know if we’ve granted the problem worth solving. What we would like is to know the man’s age. That’s some number; let’s call it M. What we know are things about how M relates to his daughter’s and his son’s age, and how those relate to one another. Since we know several things about the daughter’s age and the son’s age it’s worth giving those names too. Let’s say D for the daughter’s age and S for the son’s.

So. We know the son is three years older than the daughter. This we can write as $S = D + 3$. We know that in one year, the man will be six times as old as the daughter is now. In one year the man will be M + 1 years old. The daughter’s age now is D; six times that is 6D. So we know that $M + 1 = 6D$. In ten years the man’s age will be M + 10; the daughter’s age, D + 10; the son’s age, S + 10. In ten years, M + 10 will be 14 plus D + 10 plus S + 10. That is, $M + 10 = 14 + D + 10 + S + 10$. Or if you prefer, $M + 10 = D + S + 34$. Or even, $M = D + S + 24$.

So this is a system of three equation, all linear, in three variables. This is hopeful. We can hope there will be a solution. And there is. There are different ways to find an answer. Since I’m grading this, you can use the one that feels most comfortable to you. The problem still seems a bit advanced for Peppermint Patty and Franklin.

Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set rerun for the 13th has a bit of talk about a mathematical discovery. The comic is accurate enough for its publication. In 2008 a number known as M43112609 was proven to be prime. The number, 243,112,609 – 1, is some 12,978,189 digits long. It’s still the fifth-largest known prime number (as I write this).

Prime numbers of the form 2N – 1 for some whole number N are known as Mersenne primes. These are named for Marin Mersenne, a 16th century French friar and mathematician. They’re a neat set of numbers. Each Mersenne prime matches some perfect number. Nobody knows whether there are finite or infinitely many Mersenne primes. Every even perfect number has a form that matches to some Mersenne prime. It’s unknown whether there are any odd perfect numbers. As often happens with number theory, the questions are easy to ask but hard to answer. But all the largest known prime numbers are Mersenne primes; they’re of a structure we can test pretty well. At least that electronic computers can test well; the last time the largest known prime was found by mere mechanical computer was 1951. The last time a non-Mersenne was the largest known prime was from 1989 to 1992, and before that, 1951.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 13th starts off the jokes about 13 for this edition. It’s also the anthropomorphic-numerals joke for the week.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 13th is a joke about the connotations of numbers, with (in the western tradition) 7 lucky and 13 unlucky. And many numbers just lack any particular connotation.

T Shepherd’s Snow Sez for the 13th finishes off the unlucky-13 jokes. It observes that whatever a symbol might connote generally, your individual circumstances are more important. There are people for whom 13 is a good omen, or for whom Mondays are magnificent days, or for whom black cats are lucky.

These are all the comics I can write paragraphs about. There were more comics mentioning mathematics last week. Here were some of them:

Brian Walker, Greg Walker, and Chance Browne’s Hi and Lois for the 14th supposes that a “math nerd” can improve Thirsty’s golf game.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 14th, rerunning a strip from 1997, is a word problem joke. I needed to re-read the panels to see what Paige’s complaint was about.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 14th, repeating a strip from 1991, is about prioritizing mathematics homework. I can’t disagree with putting off the harder problems. It’s good to have experience, and doing similar but easier problems can help one crack the harder ones.

Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic for the 14th is the Rubik’s Cube joke for the week.

And that’s my comic strips for the week. I plan to have the next Reading the Comics post here on Sunday. The A to Z series resumes tomorrow, all going well. I am seeking topics for the letters I through N, at this post. Thank you for reading, and for offering your thoughts.

## Reading the Comics, April 10, 2019: Grand Avenue and Luann Want My Attention Edition

So this past week has been a curious blend for the mathematically-themed comics. There were many comics mentioning some mathematical topic. But that’s because Grand Advenue and Luann Againn — reprints of early 90s Luann comics — have been doing a lot of schoolwork. There’s a certain repetitiveness to saying, “and here we get a silly answer to a story problem” four times over. But we’ll see what I do with the work.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 7th is Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. Very comforting to see. It’s a geometry-vocabulary joke, with Wavehead noticing the similar ends of some terms. I’m disappointed that I can’t offer much etymological insight. “Vertex”, for example, derives from the Latin for “highest point”, and traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root “wer-”, meaning “to turn, to bend”. “Apex” derives from the Latin for “summit” or “extreme”. And that traces back to the Proto-Indo-European “ap”, meaning “to take, to reach”. Which is all fine, but doesn’t offer much about how both words ended up ending in “ex”. This is where my failure to master Latin by reading a teach-yourself book on the bus during my morning commute for three months back in 2002 comes back to haunt me. There’s probably something that might have helped me in there.

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute for the 7th is an activity puzzle this time. It’s also a legitimate problem of graph theory. Not a complicated one, but still, one. Graph theory is about sets of points, called vertices, and connections between points, called edges. It gives interesting results for anything that’s networked. That shows up in computers, in roadways, in blood vessels, in the spreads of disease, in maps, in shapes.

One common problem, found early in studying graph theory, is about whether a graph is planar. That is, can you draw the whole graph, all its vertices and edges, without any lines cross each other? This graph, with six vertices and three edges, is planar. There are graphs that are not. If the challenge were to connect each number to a 1, a 2, and a 3, then it would be nonplanar. That’s a famous non-planar graph, given the obvious name K3, 3. A fun part of learning graph theory — at least fun for me — is looking through pictures of graphs. The goal is finding K3, 3 or another one called K5, inside a big messy graph.

Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 8th has had a week of story problems featuring both of the kid characters. Here’s the start of them. Making an addition or subtraction problem about counting things is probably a good way of making the problem less abstract. I don’t have children, so I don’t know whether they play marbles or care about them. The most recent time I saw any of my niblings I told them about the subtleties of industrial design in the old-fashioned Western Electric Model 2500 touch-tone telephone. They love me. Also I’m not sure that this question actually tests subtraction more than it tests reading comprehension. But there are teachers who like to throw in the occasional surprisingly easy one. Keeps students on their toes.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 10th is part of a sequence showing Gunther helping Luann with her mathematics homework. The story started the day before, but this was the first time a specific mathematical topic was named. The point-slope form is a conventional way of writing an equation which corresponds to a particular line. There are many ways to write equations for lines. This is one that’s convenient to use if you know coordinates for one point on the line and the slope of the line. Any coordinates which make the equation true are then the coordinates for some point on the line.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 10th tosses in a line about logical paradoxes. In this case, using a classic problem, the self-referential statement. Working out whether a statement is true or false — its “truth value” — is one of those things we expect logic to be able to do. Some self-referential statements, logical claims about themselves, are troublesome. “This statement is false” was a good one for baffling kids and would-be world-dominating computers in science fiction television up to about 1978. Some self-referential statements seem harmless, though. Nobody expects even the most timid world-dominating computer to be bothered by “this statement is true”. It takes more than just a statement being about itself to create a paradox.

And a last note. The blog hardly needs my push to help it out, but, sometimes people will miss a good thing. Ben Orlin’s Math With Bad Drawings just ran an essay about some of the many mathematics-themed comics that Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange has run. The comic is one of my favorites too. Orlin looks through some of the comic’s twenty-plus year history and discusses the different types of mathematical jokes Price (with, in recent years, Piccolo) makes.

Myself, I keep all my Reading the Comics essays at this link, and those mentioning some aspect of Rhymes With Orange at this link.

## Reading the Comics, January 13, 2019: January 13, 2019 Edition

I admit I’m including a fairly marginal strip in this, just so I can have the fun of another single-day edition. What can I say? I can be easily swayed by silly things. Also, somehow, all four strips today have circumstances where one might mistake them for reruns. Let’s watch.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 13th is wordplay, mashing up ‘cell division’ with ‘long division’. As you might expect from Bill Amend — who loves sneaking legitimate mathematics and physics in where it’s not needed — Paige’s long cell division is a legitimate one. If you’d like a bit of recreational mathematics fun, you can figure out which microscopic organisms correspond to which numerals. The answer is also the Featured Comment on the page, at least as I write this. So if you need an answer, or you want to avoid having the answer spoiled, know what’s there.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 13th is the strip of most marginal relevance here. Part of Luann’s awful ay is a mathematics test. The given problems are nothing particularly meaningful. There is the sequence ‘mc2’ in the problem, although written as $m^c 2$. There’s also a mention of ‘googleplex’, which when the strip was first published in 1991 was nothing more than a misspelling of the quite large number. (‘Googol’ is the number; ‘Google’ a curious misspelling. Or perhaps a reversion. The name was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta. Sirotta was seven years old at the time. I accept that it is at least possible Sirotta was thinking of the then-very-popular serial-comic strip Barney Google, and that his uncle Edward Kasner, who brought the name to mathematics, wrote it down wrong.) And that carries with it the connotation that big numbers are harder than small numbers. This is … kind of true. At least, long numbers are more tedious than short numbers. But you don’t really do different work, dividing 1428 by 7, than you do dividing 147 by 7. It’s just longer. “Hard” is a flexible idea.

Mac King and Bill King’s Magic in a Minute for the 13th felt like a rerun to me. It took a bit of work to find, but yeah, it was. The strip itself, as presented, is new. But the same neat little modular-arithmetic coincidence was used the 31st of July, 2016.

Mathematics on clock faces is often used as a way to introduce modular arithmetic, a variation on arithmetic with only finitely many integers. This can help, if you’re familiar with clock faces. Like regular arithmetic, modular arithmetic can form a group and a ring. Clock faces won’t give you a group or ring, not unless you replace the number before ‘1’ with a ‘0’. To be a group, you need a collection of items, and a binary operation on the items. This operation we often think of as either addition or multiplication, depending on what makes sense for the problem. To be a ring, you need two binary operations, which interact by a distributive law. So the operations are often matched to addition and multiplication. Modular arithmetic is fun, yes. It’s also useful, not just as a way to do something like arithmetic that’s different. Many schemes for setting up checksums, quick and easy tests against data entry errors, rely on modular arithmetic on the data. And many schemes for generating ‘random’ numbers are built on finding multiplicative inverses in modular arithmetic. This isn’t truly random, of course. But you can look at a string of digits and not see any clear patterns. This is often as close to random as you need.

Rick DeTorie’s One Big Happy for the 13th is mostly a bunch of complaints the old always have against the young. Well, the complaint about parallel parking I haven’t seen before. But the rest are common enough. Featured in it is a complaint that the young can’t do arithmetic. I’m not sure there was ever a time that the older generation thought the young were well-trained in arithmetic. Nor that there was ever a time that the current educational vogue wasn’t blamed for destroying a generation’s ability to calculate. I’m sure there are better and worse ways to teach calculation. But I suspect any teaching method will fall short of addressing a couple issues. One is that people over-rate their own competence and under-rate other’s competence. So the older generation will see itself as having got the best possible arithmetic education and anything that’s different is a falling away. And another is that people get worse at stuff they don’t think is enjoyable or don’t have to do a lot. If you haven’t got a use for the fact, or an appreciation for the beauty in it, three times six is a bit of trivia, and not one that inspires much conversation when shared.

There’s more comics with something of a mathematical theme that got published last week. When I get to them the essays should be at this link.

## Reading the Comics, December 5, 2018: December 5, 2018 Edition

And then I noticed there were a bunch of comic strips with some kind of mathematical theme on the same day. Always fun when that happens.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack uses one of Holbrook’s common motifs. That’s the depicting as literal some common metaphor. in this case it’s “massaging the numbers”, which might seem not strictly mathematics. But while numbers are interesting, they’re also useful. To be useful they must connect to something we want to know. They need context. That context is always something of human judgement. If the context seems inappropriate to the listener, she thinks the presenter is massaging the numbers. If the context seems fine, we trust the numbers as showing something truth.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater is a seasonal pun that couldn’t wait for a day closer to Christmas. I’m a little curious why not. It would be the same joke with any subject, certainly. The strip did make me wonder if Ebeneezer Scrooge, in-universe, might have taken calculus. This lead me to see that it’s a bit vague what, precisely, Scrooge, or Scrooge-and-Marley, did. The movies are glad to position him as having a warehouse, and importing and exporting things, and making and collecting on loans and whatnot. These are all trades that mathematicians would like to think benefit from knowing advanced mathematics. The logic of making loans implies attention be paid to compounding interest, risks, and expectation values, as well as projecting cash-flow a fair bit into the future. But in the original text he doesn’t make any stated loans, and the only warehouse anyone enters is Fezziwig’s. Well, the Scrooge and Marley sign stands “above the warehouse door”, but we only ever go in to the counting-house. And yes, what Scrooge does besides gather money and misery is irrelevant to the setting of the story.

Teresa Burritt’s Dadaist strip Frog Applause uses knowledge of mathematics as an emblem of intelligence. “Multivariate analysis” is a term of art from statistics. It’s about measuring how one variable changes depending on two or more other variables. The goal is obvious: we know there are many things that influence anything of interest. Can we find what things have the strongest effects? The weakest effects? There are several ways we might mean “strongest” effect, too. It might mean that a small change in the independent variable produces a big change in the dependent one. Or it might mean that there’s very little noise, that a change in the independent variable produces a reliable change in the dependent one. Or we might have several variables that are difficult to measure precisely on their own, but with a combination that’s noticeable. The basic calculations for this look a lot like those for single-variable analysis. But there’s much more calculation. It’s more tedious, at least. My reading suggests that multivariate analysis didn’t develop much until there were computers cheap enough to do the calculations. Might be coincidence, though. Many machine-learning techniques can be described as multivariate analysis problems.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn is a Pi Day joke from before the time when Pi Day was a thing. Brad’s magazine flipping like that is an unusual bit of throwaway background humor for the comic strip.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens is a bunch of shape jokes. Since I was talking about tiling the plane so recently the rhombus seemed on-point enough. I’m think the irregular heptagon shown here won’t tile the plane. But given how much it turns out I didn’t know, I wouldn’t want to commit to that.

I’m working hard on a latter ‘X’ essay for my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z glossary. That should appear on Friday. And there should be another Reading the Comics post later this week, at this link.

## Reading the Comics, November 9, 2018: Standing For Things Edition

There was something in common in two of the last five comic strips worth attention from last week. That’s good enough to give the essay its name.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 8th showcases Toby discovering the point of letters in algebra. It’s easy to laugh at him being ignorant. But the use of letters this way is something it’s easy to miss. You need first to realize that we don’t need to have a single way to represent a number. Which is implicit in learning, say, that you can write ‘7’ as the Roman numeral ‘VII’ or so, but I’m not sure that’s always clear. And realizing that you could use any symbol to write out ‘7’ if you agree that’s what the symbol means? That’s an abstraction tossed onto people who often aren’t really up for that kind of abstraction. And that we can have a symbol for “a number whose identity we don’t yet know”? Or even “a number whose identity we don’t care about”? Don’t blame someone for rearing back in confusion at this.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 8th talks about vectors and scalars. And about the little ways that instructors in one subject can sabotage one another. In grad school I was witness to the mathematics department feeling quite put-upon by the engineering departments, who thought we were giving their students inadequate calculus training. Meanwhile we couldn’t figure out what they were telling students about calculus except that it was screwing up their understanding.

To a physicist, a vector is a size and a direction together. (At least until they get seriously into mathematical physics when they need a more abstract idea.) A scalar is a number. Like, a real-valued number such as ‘4’. Maybe a complex-valued number such as ‘4 + 6i’. Vectors are great because a lot of physics problems become easier when thought of in terms of directions and amounts in that direction.

A mathematician would start out with vectors and scalars like that. But then she’d move into a more abstract idea. A vector, to a mathematician, is a thing you can add to another vector and get a vector out. A scalar is something that’s not a vector but that, multiplied by a vector, gets you a vector out. This sounds circular. But by defining ‘vector’ and ‘scalar’ in how they interact with each other we get a really sweet flexibility. We can use the same reasoning — and the same proofs — for lots of things. Directions, yes. But also matrices, and continuous functions, and probabilities of events, and more. That’s a bit much to give the engineering student who’s trying to work out some problem about … I don’t know. Whatever they do over in that department. Truss bridges or electrical circuits or something.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy for the 9th is really about misheard song lyrics, a subject that will never die now that we don’t have the space to print lyrics in the album lining anymore, or album linings. But it has a joke resonant with that of The Buckets, in supposing that algebra is just some bunch of letters mixed up with numbers. And Cow and Boy was always a strip I loved, as baffling as it might be to a casual reader. It had a staggering number of running jokes, although not in this installment.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 9th shows Brad happy to work out arithmetic when it’s for something he’d like to know. The figure Luan gives is ridiculously high, though. If he needs 500 hairs, and one new hair grows in each week, then that’s a little under ten years’ worth of growth. Nine years and a bit over seven months to be exact. If a moustache hair needs to be a half-inch long, and it grows at 1/8th of an inch per month, then it takes four months to be sufficiently long. So in the slowest possible state it’d be nine years, eleven months. I can chalk Luann’s answer up to being snidely pessimistic about his hair growth. But his calculator seems to agree and that suggests something went wrong along the way.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 9th is a story problem joke. It looks to me like a reasonable story problem, too: the distance travelled and the speed are reasonable, and give sensible numbers. The two stops add a bit of complication that doesn’t seem out of line. And the kid’s confusion is fair enough. It takes some experience to realize that the problem splits into an easy part, a hard part, and an easy part. The first easy part is how long the stops take all together. That’s 25 minutes. The hard part is realizing that if you want to know the total travel time it doesn’t matter when the stops are. You can find the total travel time by adding together the time spent stopped with the time spent driving. And the other easy part is working out how long it takes to go 80 miles if you travel at 55 miles per hour. That’s just a division. So find that and add to it the 25 minutes spent at the two stops.

The various Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link. Essays which discuss The Buckets are at this link. The incredibly many essays mentioning Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link. Essays which mention Cow and Boy are at this link. Essays inspired in part by Luann, both the current-day and the vintage 1990 run, are at this link. The credibly many essays mentioning Maria’s Day are at this link.

And through the end of December my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should have two new posts a week. You might like some of them.

## Reading the Comics, September 7, 2018: The Playful Mathematics Blog Carnival Is Coming Edition

I’d like to add something to my roundup up of last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. That thing is a reminder that I’m hosting this month’s Playful Mathematics Education Carnival. It’ll post the last week of September. If you’ve recently seen pages that teach, that play games, that show any kind of mathematics that makes you smile, please, let me know. It’s worth sharing with more people.

Tom Gammill’s The Doozies for the 6th is the Venn Diagrams joke for the week. It’s only a two-circle diagram, but the comic strip hasn’t got that large a cast. And, really, would be hard to stage in a way that made the joke communicable with three or four participants.

Phil Dunlap’s Ink Pen rerun for the 7th showcases arithmetic as a putative superpower. I would agree with Dynaman that at least this addition doesn’t show off superpowers. But there are feats of arithmetic that do seem superhuman. Mathematical pop histories often mention people who could do quite complicated calculations in their head. Some of them were also great mathematicians, like Carl Friedrich Gauss, Leonhard Euler, or Srinivasa Ramanujan. Some were just … very good at calculating. Zacharias Dase is a famous 19th century example. He’s reported as having been able to multiply together two hundred-digit numbers, in his head. The process took nine hours.

Is that superhuman? Well, obviously, literally not. But it’s beyond what most of us could imagine doing. I admit I can’t imagine keeping anything straight in my head for nine hours. But. The basic rules of addition aren’t that exotic. Even a process like finding square roots can be done as additions and divisions and multiplications. Much of what makes this look hard is memory. How do you keep track of a hundred or so partial results each of a hundred or so digits? Much of what else is hard is persistence. How do you keep going after the seventh hour of this? And both are traits that you can develop, and practice, and at least get a little better on.

Or bypass the hard work. If asked 235 plus 747 I’d at least answer “a bit under a thousand”, which isn’t bad for an instant answer. 235 is a little under 250; 747 a little under 750; and 250 plus 750 is easy. Rewrite 235 as 250 – 15, and 747 as 750 – 3, and you have this: 235 + 747 is 250 + 750 – 15 – 3. So that’s 1000 minus 18. 982, pretty attainable. This takes practice. It amounts to learning how to spot an easy problem that looks like the question you actually have.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 7th shows a date living up to its potential as a fiasco. But it’s not a surprise Gunther finds himself comfortable talking trigonometry. The subject is not one that most people find cozy. I’d guess most people on introduction see it as some weird hybrid that fuses the impenetrable diagrams of geometry with the baffling formulas of algebra.

But there’s comfort in it, especially to a particular personality type. There are a lot of obscure things making up trigonometry. But there’s this beauty, too. All the basic trigonometry functions are tied together in neat little pairs and triplets. Formulas connect the properties of an angle with those of its half and its double. There’s a great many identities, particular calculations that have the same value for every angle.

You can say that about anything, of course. Any topic humans study has endless fascination. What makes mathematical fields comfortable? For one, that they promise this certain knowability. Trigonometry has a jillion definitions and rules and identities and all that. But that means you have a great many things of absolute reliability. They offer this certainty that even “hard” sciences like physics don’t have. Far more security than you see with the difficult sciences, like biology or sociology. And true dependability, compared to the mystifying and obscure rules of interacting with other humans. If you don’t feel you know how to be with people, and don’t feel like you could ever learn, a cosecant is at least something you can master.

I tag my Reading the Comics postsso that you can find as many of them as you like at this link. As long as I’ve written as many as you like. Essays in which I mention The Doozies are at this link. Or will be; turns out this is a new tag. Huh. Essays that discuss Ink Pen are at this link. And essays which mention Luann, either current or vintage, are at this link. Thanks for reading whatever you do enjoy.

## Reading the Comics, February 11, 2018: February 11, 2018 Edition

And it’s not always fair to say that the gods mock any plans made by humans, but Comic Strip Master Command has been doing its best to break me of reading and commenting on any comic strip with a mathematical theme. I grant that I could make things a little easier if I demanded more from a comic strip before including it here. But even if I think a theme is slight that doesn’t mean the reader does, and it’s easy to let the eye drop to the next paragraph if the reader does think it’s too slight. The anthology nature of these posts is part of what works for them. And then sometimes Comic Strip Master Command sends me a day like last Sunday when everybody was putting in some bit of mathematics. There’ll be another essay on the past week’s strips, never fear. But today’s is just for the single day.

Susan Camilleri Konar’s Six Chix for the 11th illustrates the Lemniscate Family. The lemniscate is a shape well known as the curve made by a bit of water inside a narrow tube by people who’ve confused it with a meniscus. An actual lemniscate is, as the chain of pointing fingers suggests, a figure-eight shape. You get — well, I got — introduced to them in prealgebra. They’re shapes really easy to describe in polar coordinates but a pain to describe in Cartesian coordinates. There are several different kinds of lemniscates, each satisfying slightly different conditions while looking roughly like a figure eight. If you’re open to the two lobes of the shape not being the same size there’s even a kind of famous-ish lemniscate called the analemma. This is the figure traced out by the sun if you look at its position from a set point on the surface of the Earth at the same clock time each day over the course of the year. That the sun moves north and south from the horizon is easy to spot. That it is sometimes east or west of some reference spot is a surprise. It shows the difference between the movement of the mean sun, the sun as we’d see it if the Earth had a perfectly circular orbit, and the messy actual thing. Dr Helmer Aslasken has a fine piece about this, and how it affects when the sun rises earliest and latest in the year.

There’s also a thing called the “polynomial lemniscate”. This is a level curve of a polynomial. That is, what are all the possible values of the independent variable which cause the polynomial to evaluate to some particular number? This is going to be a polynomial in a complex-valued variable, in order to get one or more closed and (often) wriggly loops. A polynomial of a real-valued variable would typically give you a boring shape. There’s a bunch of these polynomial lemniscates that approximate the boundary of the Mandelbrot Set, that fractal that you know from your mathematics friend’s wall in 1992.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons took care of being Mark Anderson’s Andertoons early in the week. It’s a bit of optimistic blackboard work.

Lincoln Pierce’s Big Nate features the formula for calculating the wind chill factor. Francis reads out what is legitimately the formula for estimating the wind chill temperature. I’m not going to get into whether the wind chill formula makes sense as a concept because I’m not crazy. The thinking behind it is that a windless temperature feels about the same as a different temperature with a particular wind. How one evaluates those equivalences offers a lot of room for debate. The formula as the National Weather Service, and Francis, offer looks frightening, but isn’t really hard. It’s not a polynomial, in terms of temperature and wind speed, but it’s close to that in form. The strip is rerun from the 15th of February, 2009, as Lincoln Pierce has had some not-publicly-revealed problem taking him away from the comic for about a month and a half now.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley included a couple of mathematics formulas, including the famous E = mc2 and the slightly less famous πr2, as part of Walt Wallet’s fantasy of advising scientists and inventors. (Scientists have already heard both.) There’s a curious stray bit in the corner, writing out 6.626 x 102 x 3 that I wonder about. 6.626 is the first couple digits of Planck’s Constant, as measured in Joule-seconds. (This is h, not h-bar, I say for the person about to complain.) It’d be reasonable for Scancarelli to have drawn that out of a physics book or reference page. But the exponent is all wrong, even if you suppose he mis-wrote 1023. It should be 6.626 x 10-34. So I don’t know whether Scancarelli got things very garbled, or if he just picked a nice sciencey-looking number and happened to hit on a significant one. (There’s enough significant science numbers that he’d have a fair chance of finding something.) The strip is a reprint from the 4th of February, 2007, as Jim Scancarelli has been absent for no publicly announced reason for four months now.

Greg Evans and Karen Evans’s Luann is not perfectly clear. But I think it’s presenting Gunther doing mathematics work to support his mother’s contention that he’s smart. There’s no working out what work he’s doing. But then we might ask how smart his mother is to have made that much food for just the two of them. Also that I think he’s eating a potato by hand? … Well, there are a lot of kinds of food that are hard to draw.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn reprints the strip from the 11th of February (again), 1990. It mentions as one of those fascinating things of arithmetic an easy test to see if a number’s a multiple of nine. There are several tricks like this, although the only ones anybody can remember are finding multiples of 3 and finding multiples of 9. Well, they know the rules for something being a multiple of 2, 5, or 10, but those hardly look like rules, and there’s no addition needed. Similarly with multiples of 4.

Modular arithmetic underlies all these rules. Once you know the trick you can use it to work out your own add-up-the-numbers rules to find what numbers are multiples of small numbers. Here’s an example. Think of a three-digit number. Suppose its first digit is ‘a’, its second digit ‘b’, and its third digit ‘c’. So we’d write the number as ‘abc’, or, 100a + 10b + 1c. What’s this number equal to, modulo 9? Well, 100a modulo 9 has to be equal to whatever a modulo 9 is: (100 a) modulo 9 is (100) modulo 9 — that is, 1 — times (a) modulo 9. 10b modulo 9 is (10) modulo 9 — again, 1 — times (b) modulo 9. 1c modulo 9 is … well, (c) modulo 9. Add that all together and you have a + b + c modulo 9. If a + b + c is some multiple of 9, so must be 100a + 10b + 1c.

The rules about whether something’s divisible by 2 or 5 or 10 are easy to work with since 10 is a multiple of 2, and of 5, and for that matter of 10, so that 100a + 10b + 1c modulo 10 is just c modulo 10. You might want to let this settle. Then, if you like, practice by working out what an add-the-digits rule for multiples of 11 would be. (This is made a lot easier if you remember that 10 is equal to 11 – 1.) And if you want to show off some serious arithmetic skills, try working out an add-the-digits rule for finding whether something’s a multiple of 7. Then you’ll know why nobody has ever used that for any real work.

J C Duffy’s Lug Nuts plays on the equivalence people draw between intelligence and arithmetic ability. Also on the idea that brain size should have something particularly strong link to intelligence. Really anyone having trouble figuring out 15% of $10 is psyching themselves out. They’re too much overwhelmed by the idea of percents being complicated to realize that it’s, well, ten times 15 cents. ## Reading the Comics, January 22, 2018: Breaking Workflow Edition So I was travelling last week, and this threw nearly all my plans out of whack. We stayed at one of those hotels that’s good enough that its free Internet is garbage and they charge you by day for decent Internet. So naturally Comic Strip Master Command sent a flood of posts. I’m trying to keep up and we’ll see if I wrap up this past week in under three essays. And I am not helped, by the way, by GoComics.com rejiggering something on their server so that My Comics Page won’t load, and breaking their “Contact Us” page so that that won’t submit error reports. If someone around there can break in and turn one of their servers off and on again, I’d appreciate the help. Hy Eisman’s Katzenjammer Kids for the 21st of January is a curiously-timed Tax Day joke. (Well, the Katzenjammer Kids lapsed into reruns a dozen years ago and there’s probably not much effort being put into selecting seasonally appropriate ones.) But it is about one of the oldest and still most important uses of mathematics, and one that never gets respect. Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals rerun for the 21st gets Oliver the reputation for being a little computer because he’s good at arithmetic. There is something that amazes in a person who’s able to calculate like this without writing anything down or using a device to help. Steve Kelley and Jeff Parker’s Dustin for the 22nd seems to be starting off with a story problem. It might be a logic problem rather than arithmetic. It’s hard to say from what’s given. Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 22nd is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. Well, for Monday, as I write this. It’s got your classic blackboard full of equations for the people in over their head. The equations look to me like gibberish. There’s a couple diagrams of aromatic organic compounds, which suggests some quantum-mechanics chemistry problem, if you want to suppose this could be narrowed down. Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 22nd has Luann despair about ever understanding algebra without starting over from scratch and putting in excessively many hours of work. Sometimes it feels like that. My experience when lost in a subject has been that going back to the start often helps. It can be easier to see why a term or a concept or a process is introduced when you’ve seen it used some, and often getting one idea straight will cause others to fall into place. When that doesn’t work, trying a different book on the same topic — even one as well-worn as high school algebra — sometimes helps. Just a different writer, or a different perspective on what’s key, can be what’s needed. And sometimes it just does take time working at it all. Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac rerun for the 22nd includes as part of a kit of William Shakespeare paper dolls the Typing Monkey. It’s that lovely, whimsical figure that might, in time, produce any written work you could imagine. I think I’d retired monkeys-at-typewriters as a thing to talk about, but I’m easily swayed by Thompson’s art and comic stylings so here it is. Darrin Bell and Theron Heir’s Rudy Park for the 18th throws around a lot of percentages. It’s circling around the sabermetric-style idea that everything can be quantified, and measured, and that its changes can be tracked. In this case it’s comments on Star Trek: Discovery, but it could be anything. I’m inclined to believe that yeah, there’s an astounding variety of things that can be quantified and measured and tracked. But it’s also easy, especially when you haven’t got a good track record of knowing what is important to measure, to start tracking what amounts to random noise. (See any of my monthly statistics reviews, when I go looking into things like views-per-visitor-per-post-made or some other dubiously meaningful quantity.) So I’m inclined to side with Randy and his doubts that the Math Gods sanction this much data-mining. ## Reading the Comics, January 13, 2018: Barney Google Is Messing With My Head For Some Reason Edition I do not know what’s possessed John Rose, cartoonist for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith — possibly the oldest syndicated comic strip not in perpetual reruns — to decide he needs to mess with my head. So far as I’m aware we haven’t ever even had any interactions. While I’ll own up to snarking about the comic strip here and there, I mean, the guy draws Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. He won’t attract the snark community of, say, Marmaduke, but he knew the job was dangerous when he took it. There’s lots of people who’ve said worse things about the comic than I ever have. He can’t be messing with them all. There’s no mathematical content to it, but here, continuing the curious thread of Elviney and Miss Prunelly looking the same, and Elviney turning out to have a twin sister, is the revelation that Elviney’s husband also has a twin. This means something and I don’t know what. To mathematics: Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal gets my attention again for the 10th. There is this famous quotation from Leopold Kronecker, one of the many 19th century German mathematicians who challenged, and set, our ideas of what mathematics is. In debates about what should count as a proof Kronecker said something translated in English to, “God created the integers, all else is the work of man”. He favored proofs that only used finite numbers, and only finitely many operations, and was skeptical of existence proofs. Those are ones that show something with desired properties must exist, without necessarily showing how to find it. Most mathematicians accept existence proofs. If you can show how to find that thing, that’s a constructive proof. Usually mathematicians like those better. Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City for the 11th uses a bunch of arithmetic and word problems to represent all of Dean’s homework. All looks like reasonable homework for my best guess about his age. Jon Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse for the 11th is a fun, simple joke with some complex stuff behind it. It’s riffing on the kind of atheist who wants moral values to come from something in the STEM fields. So here’s a mathematical basis for some moral principles. There are, yes, ethical theories that have, or at least imply having, mathematics behind them. Utilitarianism at least supposes that ethical behavior can be described as measurable and computable quantities. Nobody actually does that except maybe to make video games more exciting. But it’s left with the idea that one could, and hope that this would lead to guidance that doesn’t go horribly wrong. Don Asmussen’s Bad Reporter for the 12th uses knowledge of arithmetic as a signifier of intelligence. Common enough joke style. Thom Bluemel’s Birdbrains for the 13th starts Pi Day observances early, or maybe supposed the joke would be too out of season were it to come in March. Greg Evans and Karen Evans’s Luann for the 13th uses mathematics to try building up the villainy of one of the strip’s designated villains. Ann Eiffel, there, uses a heap of arithmetic to make her lingerie sale sound better. This isn’t simply a riff on people not wanting to do arithmetic, although I understand people not wanding to work out what five percent of a purchase of over$200 is. There’s a good deal of weird psychology in getting people to buy things. Merely naming a number, for example, gets people to “anchor” their expectations to it. To speak of a free gift worth $75 makes any purchase below$75 seem more economical. To speak of a chance to win $1,000 prepares people to think they’ve got a thousand dollars coming in, and that they can safely spend under that. It’s amazing stuff to learn about, and it isn’t all built on people being too lazy to figure out what five percent off of$220 would be.

T Lewis and Michael Fry’s Over the Hedge for the 13th uses &infty; along the way to making nonsense out of ice-skating judging. It’s a good way to make a hash of a rating system. Most anything done with infinitely large numbers or infinitely large sets challenges one’s intuition at least. This is part of what Leopold Kronecker was talking about.

## Reading the Comics, December 11, 2017: Vamping For Andertoons Edition

So Mark Anderson’s Andertoons has been missing from the list of mathematically-themed the last couple weeks. Don’t think I haven’t been worried about that. But it’s finally given another on-topic-enough strip and I’m not going to include it here. I’ve had a terrible week and I’m going to use the comics we got in last week slowly.

Hector D Cantu and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 10th of December uses algebra as the type for homework you’d need help with. It reads plausibly enough to me, at least so far as I remember learning algebra.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 10th reprints the strip of the 10th of December, 1989. And as often happens, mathematics is put up as the stuff that’s too hard to really do. The expressions put up don’t quite parse; there’s nothing to solve. But that’s fair enough for a panicked brain. To not recognize what the problem even is makes it rather hard to solve.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 10th is an installation of Quantum Mechanic, playing on the most fun example of non-commutative processes I know. That’s the uncertainty principle, which expresses itself as pairs of quantities that can’t be precisely measured simultaneously. There are less esoteric kinds of non-commutative processes. Like, rotating something 90 degrees along a horizontal and then along a vertical axis will turn stuff different from 90 degrees vertical and then horizontal. But that’s too easy to understand to capture the imagination, at least until you’re as smart as an adult and as thoughtful as a child.

Maria Scrivan’s Half Full for the 11th features Albert Einstein and one of the few equations that everybody knows. So that’s something.

Jeff Stahler’s Moderately Confused for the 11th features the classic blackboard full of equations, this time to explain why Christmas lights wouldn’t work. There is proper mathematics in lights not working. It’s that electrical-engineering work about the flow of electricity. The problem is, typically, a broken or loose bulb. Maybe a burnt-out fuse, although I have never fixed a Christmas lights problem by replacing the fuse. It’s just something to do so you can feel like you’ve taken action before screaming in rage and throwing the lights out onto the front porch. More interesting to me is the mathematics of strands getting tangled. The idea — a foldable thread, marked at regular intervals by points that can hook together — seems trivially simple. But it can give insight into how long molecules, particularly proteins, will fold together. It may help someone frustrated to ponder that their light strands are knotted for the same reasons life can exist. But I’m not sure it ever does.