Reading the Comics, May 7, 2022: Does Comic Strip Master Command Not Do Mathematics Anymore Edition?

I mentioned in my last Reading the Comics post that it seems there are fewer mathematics-themed comic strips than there used to be. I know part of this is I’m trying to be more stringent. You don’t need me to say every time there’s a Roman numerals joke or that blackboards get mathematics symbols put on them. Still, it does feel like there’s fewer candidate strips. Maybe the end of the 2010s was a boom time for comic strips aimed at high school teachers and I only now appreciate that? Only further installments of this feature will let us know.

Jim Benton’s Jim Benton Cartoons for the 18th of April, 2022 suggests an origin for those famous overlapping circle pictures. This did get me curious what’s known about how John Venn came to draw overlapping circles. There’s no reason he couldn’t have used triangles or rectangles or any shape, after all. It looks like the answer is nobody really knows.

Venn, himself, didn’t name the diagrams after himself. Wikipedia credits Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) as describing “Venn’s Method of Diagrams” in 1896. Clarence Irving Lewis, in 1918, seems to be the first person to write “Venn Diagram”. Venn wrote of them as “Eulerian Circles”, referencing the Leonhard Euler who just did everything. Sir William Hamilton — the philosopher, not the quaternions guy — posthumously published the Lectures On Metaphysics and Logic which used circles in these diagrams. Hamilton asserted, correctly, that you could use these to represent logical syllogisms. He wrote that the 1712 logic text Nucleus Logicae Weisianae — predating Euler — used circles, and was right about that. He got the author wrong, crediting Christian Weise instead of the correct author, Johann Christian Lange.

Jim Benton’s Jim Benton Cartoons for the 18th of April, 2022. Although I didn’t have a tag for Jim Benton cartoons before I have discussed them a couple times. Future essays mentioning Jim Benton Cartoons should be at this link.

With 1712 the trail seems to end to this lay person doing a short essay’s worth of research. I don’t know what inspired Lange to try circles instead of any other shape. My guess, unburdened by evidence, is that it’s easy to draw circles, especially back in the days when every mathematician had a compass. I assume they weren’t too hard to typeset, at least compared to the many other shapes available. And you don’t need to even think about setting them with a rotation, the way a triangle or a pentagon might demand. But I also would not rule out a notion that circles have some connotation of perfection, in having infinite axes of symmetry and all points on them being equal in distance from the center and such. Might be the reasons fit in the intersection of the ethereal and the mundane.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 29th of April, 2022. This and other essays mentioning Long Story Short should be at this link.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 29th of April, 2022 puts out a couple of concepts from mathematical physics. These are all about geometry, which we now see as key to understanding physics. Particularly cosmology. The no-boundary proposal is a model constructed by James Hartle and Stephen Hawking. It’s about the first seconds of the universe after the Big Bang. This is an era that was so hot that all our well-tested models of physical law break down. The salient part of the Hartle-Hawking proposal is the idea that in this epoch time becomes indistinguishable from space. If I follow it — do not rely on my understanding for your thesis defense — it’s kind of the way that stepping away from the North Pole first creates the ideas of north and south and east and west. It’s very hard to think of a way to test this which would differentiate it from other hypotheses about the first instances of the universe.

The Weyl Curvature is a less hypothetical construct. It’s a tensor, one of many interesting to physicists. This one represents the tidal forces on a body that’s moving along a geodesic. So, for example, how the moon of a planet gets distorted over its orbit. The Weyl Curvature also offers a way to describe how gravitational waves pass through vacuum. I’m not aware of any serious question of the usefulness or relevance of the thing. But the joke doesn’t work without at least two real physics constructs as setup.

Liniers’ Macanudo for the 5th of May, 2022. Essays about some topic mentioned in Macanudo should be at this link.

Liniers’ Macanudo for the 5th of May, 2022 has one of the imps who inhabit the comic asserting responsibility for making mathematics work. It’s difficult to imagine what a creature could do to make mathematics work, or to not work. If pressed, we would say mathematics is the set of things we’re confident we could prove according to a small, pretty solid-seeming set of logical laws. And a somewhat larger set of axioms and definitions. (Few of these are proved completely, but that’s because it would involve a lot of fiddly boring steps that nobody doubts we could do if we had to. If this sounds sketchy, consider: do you believe my claim that I could alphabetize the books on the shelf to my right, even though I’ve never done that specific task? Why?) It would be like making a word-search puzzle not work.

The punch line, the blue imp counting seventeen of the orange imp, suggest what this might mean. Mathematics as a set of statements following some rule, is a niche interest. What we like is how so many mathematical things seem to correspond to real-world things. We can imagine mathematics breaking that connection to the real world. The high temperature rising one degree each day this week may tell us something about this weekend, but it’s useless for telling us about November. So I can imagine a magical creature deciding what mathematical models still correspond to the thing they model. Be careful in trying to change their mind.

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And that’s as many comic strips from the last several weeks that I think merit discussion. All of my Reading the Comics posts should be at this link, though. And I hope to have a new one again sometime soon. I’ll ask my contacts with the cartoonists. I have about half of a contact.

Reading the Comics, May 23, 2020: Parents Can’t Do Math Edition

This was a week of few mathematically-themed comic strips. I don’t mind. If there was a recurring motif, it was about parents not doing mathematics well, or maybe at all. That’s not a very deep observation, though. Let’s look at what is here.

Liniers’s Macanudo for the 18th puts forth 2020 as “the year most kids realized their parents can’t do math”. Which may be so; if you haven’t had cause to do (say) long division in a while then remembering just how to do it is a chore. This trouble is not unique to mathematics, though. Several decades out of regular practice they likely also have trouble remembering what the 11th Amendment to the US Constitution is for, or what the rule is about using “lie” versus “lay”. Some regular practice would correct that, though. In most cases anyway; my experience suggests I cannot possibly learn the rule about “lie” versus “lay”. I’m also shaky on “set” as a verb.

Liniers’s Macanudo for the 18th of May, 2020. Essays inspired by something mentioned in Macanudo are gathered at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 18th shows a mathematician talking, in the jargon of first and second derivatives, to support the claim there’ll never be a mathematician president. Yes, Weinersmith is aware that James Garfield, 20th President of the United States, is famous in trivia circles for having an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem. It would be a stretch to declare Garfield a mathematician, though, except in the way that anyone capable of reason can be a mathematician. Raymond Poincaré, President of France for most of the 1910s and prime minister before and after that, was not a mathematician. He was cousin to Henri Poincaré, who founded so much of our understanding of dynamical systems and of modern geometry. I do not offhand know what presidents (or prime ministers) of other countries have been like.

Weinersmith’s mathematician uses the jargon of the profession. Specifically that of calculus. It’s unlikely to communicate well with the population. The message is an ordinary one, though. The first derivative of something with respect to time means the rate at which things are changing. The first derivative of a thing, with respect to time being positive means that the quantity of the thing is growing. So, that first half means “things are getting more bad”.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 18th of May, 2020. I feel sometimes like I’m always writing about this strip, but it’s been over a month since the last time I did. Anyway essays inspired by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal appear at this link.

The second derivative of a thing with respect to time, though … this is interesting. The second derivative is the same thing as the first derivative with respect to time of “the first derivative with respect to time”. It’s what the change is in the rate-of-change. If that second derivative is negative, then the first derivative will, in time, change from being positive to being negative. So the rate of increase of the original thing will, in time, go from a positive to a negative number. And so the quantity will eventually decline.

So the mathematician is making a this-is-the-end-of-the-beginning speech. The point at which the the second derivative of a quantity changes sign is known as the “inflection point”. Reaching that is often seen as the first important step in, for example, disease epidemics. It is usually the first good news, the promise that there will be a limit to the badness. It’s also sometimes mentioned in economic crises or sometimes demographic trends. “Inflection point” is likely as technical a term as one can expect the general public to tolerate, though. Even that may be pushing things.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 19th has a father who can’t help his son do mathematics. In this case, finding square roots. There are many ways to find square roots by hand. Some are iterative, in which you start with an estimate and do a calculation that (typically) gets you a better estimate of the square root you want. And then repeat the calculation, starting from that improved estimate. Some use tables of things one can expect to have calculated, such as exponentials and logarithms. Or trigonometric tables, if you know someone who’s worked out lots of cosines and sines already.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 19th of May, 2020. This strip, too, I feel like I write about all the time. No, though; it’s hasn’t been mentioned since Pi Day. You can see that and other appearances of Real Life Adventures at this link.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie rerun for the 20th mentions romantic triangles. And Moose’s relief that there’s only two people in his love triangle. So that’s our geometry wordplay for the week.

Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes repeat for the 20th has Calvin escaping mathematics class.

Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set rerun for the 21st fusses around words. Along the way Burl mentions his having learned that two negatives can make a positive, in mathematics. Here it’s (most likely) the way that multiplying or dividing two negative numbers will produce a positive number.

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This covers the week. My next Reading the Comics post should appear at this tag, when it’s written. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, January 25, 2020: Comic Strip Master Command Is Making This Hard For Me Edition

Or they’re making it easy for me. But for another week all the comic strips mentioning mathematics have done so in casual ways. Ones that I don’t feel I can write a substantial paragraph about. And so, ones that I don’t feel I can fairly use the images of here. Here’s strips that at least said “math” somewhere in them:

Mark Pett’s Mr Lowe rerun for the 18th had the hapless teacher giving out a quiz about fractions.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 19th plays on the conflation of “zero” and “nothing”. The concepts are related, and we wouldn’t have a zero if we weren’t trying to worth with the concept of nothing. But there is a difference that’s quite hard to talk about without confusing matters.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 19th has a student accused of cheating on a pre-algebra test.

Liniers’s Macanudo for the 21st has a kid struggling with mathematics while the imaginary friend goes off and plays.

Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate: First Class for the 21st has Nate struggling with mathematics. The strip is a reprint of the Big Nate from the 23rd of January, 1995.

Greg Curfman’s Meg for the 21st has Meg doing arithmetic homework.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 23rd is a wordplay joke, with a flash card that has an addition problem on it.

One of Gary Larson’s The Far Side reprints for the 24th has a man demanding the answer to one question: the square root of an arbitrary number. It’s a little over 70, and that’s as far as anyone could reasonably expect to answer off the top of their head.

James Beutel’s Banana Triangle for the 24th quotes The Wizard Of Oz’s famous garbled version of the Pythagorean Theorem.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 25th presents a sinister reading of the fad of “prove you’re human” puzzles that demanded arithmetic expressions be done. All computer programs, including, like, Facebook group messages are arithmetic operations ultimately. The steps could be translated into simple expressions like this and be done by humans. It just takes work which, I suppose, could also be translated into other expressions.

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And with that large pile of mentions I finish off the mathematical comic strips for the day. Also for the month: next Sunday gets us already into February. Sometime then I should post at this link a fresh Reading the Comics essay. Thank you for reading this one.

Reading the Comics, April 5, 2019: The Slow Week Edition

People reading my Reading the Comics post Sunday maybe noticed something. I mean besides my correct, reasonable complaining about the Comics Kingdom redesign. That is that all the comics were from before the 30th of March. That is, none were from the week before the 7th of April. The last full week of March had a lot of comic strips. The first week of April didn’t. So things got bumped a little. Here’s the results. It wasn’t a busy week, not when I filter out the strips that don’t offer much to write about. So now I’m stuck for what to post Thursday.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 3rd is a Library of Babel comic strip. This is mathematical enough for me. Jorge Luis Borges’s Library is a magnificent representation of some ideas about infinity and probability. I’m surprised to realize I haven’t written an essay specifically about it. I have touched on it, in writing about normal numbers, and about the infinite monkey theorem.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 3rd of April, 2019. I would have sworn that I write more about this strip. But this seems to be the first time I’ve mentioned it since 2017. Well, that and other Robbie and Bobby-based essays are at this link.

The strip explains things well enough. The Library holds every book that will ever be written. In the original story there are some constraints. Particularly, all the books are 410 pages. If you wanted, say, a 600-page book, though, you could find one book with the first 410 pages and another book with the remaining 190 pages and then some filler. The catch, as explained in the story and in the comic strip, is finding them. And there is the problem of finding a ‘correct’ text. Every possible text of the correct length should be in there. So every possible book that might be titled Mark Twain vs Frankenstein, including ones that include neither Mark Twain nor Frankenstein, is there. Which is the one you want to read?

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 4th of April, 2019. Now this strip I’ve written about as recently as October. That appearance, and other Archie strips, are discussed at this link.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 4th features an equal-divisions problem. In principle, it’s easy to divide a pizza (or anything else) equally; that’s what we have fractions for. Making them practical is a bit harder. I do like Jughead’s quick work, though. It’s got the slight-of-hand you expect from stage magic.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 4th of April, 2019. And this strip I’ve written about … wait, can I really have gone since early March without mentioning? Huh. Well, so it appears. Essays discussing The Argyle Sweater appear at this link.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 4th takes place in an algebra class. I’m not sure what algebraic principle demonstrates, but it probably came from somewhere. It’s 4,829,210. The exponentials on the blackboard do cue the reader to the real joke, of the sign reading “kick¹⁰ me”. I question whether this is really an exponential kicking situation. It seems more like a simple multiplication to me. But it would be harder to make that joke read clearly.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 5th is part of a sequence investigating how magnets work. Agnes and Trout find just … magnet parts inside. This is fair. It’s even mathematics.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 5th of April, 2019. And this strip I quite like, but don’t get to discuss enough. My essays featuring Agnes appears at this link.

Thermodynamics classes teach one of the great mathematical physics models. This is about what makes magnets. Magnets are made of … smaller magnets. This seems like question-begging. Ultimately you get down to individual molecules, each of which is very slightly magnetic. When small magnets are lined up in the right way, they can become a strong magnet. When they’re lined up in another way, they can be a weak magnet. Or no magnet at all.

How do they line up? It depends on things, including how the big magnet is made, and how it’s treated. A bit of energy can free molecules to line up, making a stronger magnet out of a weak one. Or it can break up the alignments, turning a strong magnet into a weak one. I’ve had physics instructors explain that you could, in principle, take an iron rod and magnetize it just by hitting it hard enough on the desk. And then demagnetize it by hitting it again. I have never seen one do this, though.

This is more than just a physics model. The mathematics of it is … well, it can be easy enough. A one-dimensional, nearest-neighbor model, lets us describe how materials might turn into magnets or break apart, depending on their temperature. Two- or three-dimensional models, or models that have each small magnet affected by distant neighbors, are harder.

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And then there’s the comic strips that didn’t offer much to write about.
Brian Basset’s Red and Rover for the 3rd,
Liniers’s Macanudo for the 5th, Stephen Bentley’s Herb and Jamaal rerun for the 5th, and Gordon Bess’s Redeye rerun for the 5th all idly mention mathematics class, or things brought up in class.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 2nd is another more-than-100-percent strip. Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 3rd is a reprint of his Christmas Tree guide including a fir that “no longer inhabits Euclidean space”.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 31st depicts a common idiom about numbers. Eric the Circle for the 5th, by Rafoliveira, plays on the ∞ symbol.

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And that covers the mathematically-themed comic strips from last week. There are more coming, though. I’ll show them on Sunday. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, January 28, 2019: Stock Subjects Edition

There are some subjects that seem to come up all the time in these Reading the Comics posts. Lotteries. Roman numerals. Venn Diagrams. The New Math. Kids not doing arithmetic well, or not understanding when they do it. This is the slate of comics for today’s discussion.

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 27th is the Roman Numerals joke for the week. I am not certain there is a strong consensus about the origins of Roman numerals. It’s hard to suppose that the first several numerals, though, are all that far from tally marks. Adding serifs just makes the numerals probably easier to read, if harder to write. I’ll go along with Nancy’s excuse of using the weights to represent work with a lesser weight.

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 27th of January, 2019. When I make an excuse to write about Nancy the results should be at this link.

Joe Martin’s Mr Boffo for the 27th is a lottery joke. And a probability joke, comparing the chances of being struck by lightning to those of winning the lottery. This gives me an excuse to link back to The Wandering Melon joke about the person who suffered both. And that incident in which a person did both win the lottery and get struck by lightning, albeit several years apart.

Joe Martin’s Mr Boffo for the 27th of January, 2019. I can’t find a way to link specifically to a particular day’s strip, but the previous link will bring one to the archives page. This seems to be the first time I’ve written about Mr Boffo since 2017, but all the essays when I did should be here.

Rick DeTorie’s One Big Happy for the 28th has the kid, Joe, impressed by something that he ought to have already expected. Grandpa uses this to take a crack at “that new, new math”, as though there were a time people weren’t amazed by what they should have deduced. Or a level of person who’s not surprised by the implications. One of Richard Feynman’s memoirs recounts him pranking people who have taken calculus by pointing out how whatever way you hold a French curve, the lowest point on it has a horizontal slope. This is true of the drafting instrument; but it’s also true of any curve that hasn’t got a corner or discontinuity.

Rick DeTorie’s One Big Happy for the 28th of January, 2019. There are two different strips online daily for One Big Happy and essays mentioning either are here.

There aren’t comments (so far as I’m aware) on Creators.com, which hosted this strip. So there weren’t any cracks about Common Core. But I am curious whether DeTorie wrote Grandpa as mentioning the New Math because the character would, plausibly, have seen that educational reform movement come and go. Or did DeTorie just riff on the New Math because that’s been a reliable punching bag since the mid-60s?

Liniers’s Macanudo for the 28th of January, 2019. This seems to be the first essay I’ve written for this strip. But any mentions of Macanudo from here on should be at this link.

Liniers’s Macanudo for the 28th is the Venn Diagram joke for the week. And it commits to its Venn-ness. This did make me wonder whether John Venn did marry. Well, he’d taught at Cambridge in the 19th century. Sometimes marrying was forbidden. He married Sussanna Carnegie Edmonstone in 1867, and they had one child. I know nothing about whether he ever had a significant marital problem.

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This past week was much busier for mathematically-themed comic strips. There’s going to be at least one more essay this week. There might be two. They’ll appear here, along with all the other Reading the Comics posts.