## Reading the Comics, May 29, 2020: Slipping Into Summer More Edition

This is the slightly belated close of last week’s topics suggested by Comic Strip Master Command. For the week we’ve had, I am doing very well.

Werner Wejp-Olsen’s Inspector Danger’s Crime Quiz for the 25th of May sees another mathematician killed, and “identifying” his killer in a dying utterance. Inspector Danger has followed killer mathematicians several times before: the 9th of July, 2012, for instance. Or the 4th of July, 2016, for a case so similar that it’s almost a Slylock Fox six-differences puzzle. Apparently realtors and marine biologists are out for mathematicians’ blood. I’m not surprised by the realtors, but hey, marine biology, what’s the deal? The same gimmick got used the 15th of May, 2017, too. (And in fairness to the late Wejp-Olsen, who could possibly care that similar names are being used in small puzzles used years apart? It only stands out because I’m picking out things that no reasonable person would notice.)

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 25th has the title character inspired by the legend of genius work done during plague years. A great disruption in life is a great time to build new habits, and if Covid-19 has given you the excuse to break bad old habits, or develop good new ones, great! Congratulations! If it has not, though? That’s great too. You’re surviving the most stressful months of the 21st century, I hope, not taking a holiday.

Anyway, the legend mentioned here includes Newton inventing Calculus while in hiding from the plague. The actual history is more complicated, and ambiguous. (You will not go wrong supposing that the actual history of a thing is more complicated and ambiguous than you imagine.) The Renaissance Mathematicus describes, with greater authority and specificity than I could, what Newton’s work was more like. And some of how we have this legend. This is not to say that the 1660s were not astounding times for Newton, nor to deny that he worked with a rare genius. It’s more that we are lying to imagine that Newton looked around, saw London was even more a deathtrap than usual, and decided to go off to the country and toss out a new and unique understanding of the infinitesimal and the continuum.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 27th is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. One of the students — not Wavehead — worries that a geometric ray, going on forever, could endanger people. There’s some neat business going on here. Geometry, like much mathematics, works on abstractions that we take to be universally true. But it also seems to have a great correspondence to ordinary real-world stuff. We wouldn’t study it if it didn’t. So how does that idealization interact with the reality? If the ray represented by those marks on the board goes on to do something, do we have to take care in how it’s used?

Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy for the 29th is set in a (virtual) arithmetic class. It builds on the conflation between “nothing” and “zero”.

And that wraps up my week in comic strips. I keep all my Reading the Comics posts at this link. I am also hoping to start my All 2020 Mathematics A-to-Z shortly, and am open for nominations for topics for the first couple letters. Thank you for reading.

## Reading the Comics, January 4, 2020: The Little Things Edition

Today’s essay is just to mention the comic strips which, last week, said mathematics but in some incidental way. Or some way that I can’t write a reasonable blog entry for.

Gary Larson’s The Far Side reruns for the 30th of December, 2019, included this classic about curiosity killing cats. This 1985 strip rates a mention because a blackboard of mathematical symbols gets used to represent their intellectual inquiries.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 29th, a Sunday and thus new strip, is some wordplay based on the Disney+ line of entertainment product.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 29th has the time-travelling Professor Xemit (get it?) show a Times Square Ball Drop of the future. The ball gets replaced with a “demihypercube”, the idea being that the future will have some more complicated geometry than a mere “ball”. There is no such thing as “a” demihypercube, in the same way there is not “a” pentagon. There is a family of shapes, all called demihypercubes. There’s a variety of ways to represent them. A reasonable one, though, is a roughly spherical shape made of pointy triangles all over. It wouldn’t look absurd. There are probably time ball drops that use something like a demihypercube already.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix rerun for the 1st of January, 2020 features a Comics For The Elderly speaking of the advantages an abacus has over a spreadsheet.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 2nd has one of the student athletes working on calculus. And coach Mimi Thorp is doing the mathematics of studying athlete performance. If this strip makes you curious, too, my other blog should this Sunday recap what’s going on in Gil Thorp.

Also this coming Sunday I should look at more mathematically-themed comic strips. That should appear at this link, unless something urgent commands my attention first. Thank you.

## Reading the Comics, November 22, 2019: The Minor Comics of the Week Edition

I’m finding it surprisingly good for my workflow to use Sundays for the comic strips which mention mathematics only casually. Tomorrow or so I’ll get to the ones with substantial material, in an essay available at this link.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 18th is a wordplay joke, based on a word containing syllables which roughly sound like “algebra”.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 19th is a sudoku joke, with Monty filling in things that aren’t numerals. Many of them are commonly used mathematical symbols. The ones that I don’t recognize I suspect come from physics applications, especially particle physics. These rely heavily on differential equations and group theory and are likely where Meddick got things like the $\Omega_b$ and the $\nu^{\pm}$ from.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 22nd is the Roman Numerals joke for the week.

Thank you. And please stop in Tuesday when I hope to reach the next-to-final of my A-to-Z essays for the year.

## Reading the Comics, March 30, 2019: Comics Kingdom is Screwed Up Edition

It doesn’t affect much this batch of comics, as they’re a bunch that all came from GoComics.com. But Comics Kingdom suffered a major redesign of the web site this week, and so it’s lost a lot of functionality. The ability to load your whole comics page at once, for example. Or the ability of archives to work. I’d had the URL for one strip copied down because it mentioned mathematics, albeit in so casual a manner I didn’t mean to write a paragraph about it. Good luck that I didn’t, as that URL now directs to a Spanish translation of a Katzenjammer Kids strip. Why? That’s a good question, and one that deserves an answer.

Anyway, I’m hoping that Comics Kingdom is able to get over their redesign soon. But I know they won’t. There’s never been a web site redesign that lowered functionality and made the page more infuriating to work with that was ever abandoned for the older, working version instead.

Enough about Comics Kingdom. Let me share a couple comic strips from a web site that works, although not as well as it did before its 2018 redesign.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 27th is part of a fun storyline. In it Monty and Moondog’s cell phones start texting on their own. It’s presented as the start of an Artificial Intelligence-based singularity, computers transcending human thought and going into business for themselves. This is shown by their working out mathematical truths, starting with arithmetic and going into Boolean algebra. Humans learn arithmetic first and Boolean algebra — logical statements and their combinations — later on, if ever.

Computers are certainly able to discover mathematics on their own. Or at least without close guidance; someone still has to write a program to do it. Automated proof finders are a well-established thing, though. They have not, so far as I’ve heard, discovered anything likely to threaten humanity.

Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s The Chuckle Brothers for the 28th is built on representing huge numbers. 818613 is a big number: 548,568,842,280,381. Even bigger is 37575: it’s 748,524,423,279,410,560. It’s silly to imagine needing an identification number that large. But it’s also a remarkable coincidence that both prisoners here have numbers that can be represented with no more than six digits. There aren’t so many 15-digit numbers that could be represented with as few as six digits. But then it would be an absurdly large prison if it “only” had 818,613 prisoners in it. That seems like the joke would have been harder to recognize, though.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 28th is sort of the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. It’s also a joke for my friend with the meteorology degree, who I think doesn’t actually read these posts. Well, he probably got the comic forwarded to him anyway.

Daniel Beyer’s Long Story Short for the 29th is another prison joke. I’m not sure if someone at Comic Strip Master Command was worried about something. But a scrawl of mathematics is used as icon of skills learned in prison.

Mathematics has the reputation of being a subject someone can still do useful work in while in prison. Maybe even do more work, as it seems to offer the prospect of undistracted time to think. And there are examples of mathematicians doing noteworthy work while imprisoned. Bertrand Russell wrote the Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy while jailed for protesting the First World War. André Weil advanced his work in arithmetic geometry while in prison for resisting service in the Second World War. Évariste Galois spent six months in prison shortly before the end of his life, and used some of the time to work on the theory of equations for which we still remember him. I would not recommend prison as a way to advance one’s mathematical research. But it’s something which could happen.

Terry LaBan and Patty LaBan’s Edge City for the 30th showcases the motivation problem. Colin, like many people, is easily able to do complicated algorithms to do something he likes doing. Arithmetic drills, though, not so much. This is why we end up writing story problems with dubious amounts of story in them.

And I don’t want to devote too much space to this. But Brian Fies’s The Last Mechanical Monster for the 29th included the lead character, the Mad Scientist, working out the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence as a way to keep his mind going. The strip is a rerun and I discussed it when it first ran on GoComics.

There were quite a lot of mathematically-themed comic strips the week of the 24th of March. I’ll get to the actual strips of the past week soon, at this link. Also if anyone knows a way to get the old Comics Kingdom back please let me know.

## Reading the Comics, February 24, 2018: My One Boring Linear Algebra Anecdote Edition

Wait for it.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 21st mentions mathematics — geometry, primarily — as something a substitute teacher has tried teaching with the use of a cucumber and condom. These aren’t terrible examples to use to make concrete the difference between volumes and surface areas. There are limitations, though. It’s possible to construct a shape that has a finite volume but an infinitely large surface area, albeit not using cucumbers.

There’s also a mention of the spring constant, and physics. This isn’t explicitly mathematical. But the description of movement on a spring are about the first interesting differential equation of mathematical physics. The solution is that of simple harmonic motion. I don’t think anyone taking the subject for the first time would guess at the answer. But it’s easy enough to verify it’s right. And this motion — sine waves — just turns up everywhere in mathematical physics.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 23rd just mentions mathematics as a topic Hugo finds challenging, and what’s challenging about it. So a personal story: when I took Intro to Linear Algebra my freshman year one day I spaced on the fact we had an exam. So, I put the textbook on the shelf under my desk, and then forgot to take it when I left. The book disappeared, of course, and the professor never heard of it being turned in to lost-and-found or anything. Fortunately the homework was handwritten questions passed out on photocopies (ask your parents), so I could still do the assignments, but for all those, you know, definitions and examples I had to rely on my own notes. I don’t know why I couldn’t ask a classmate. Shyness, probably. Came through all right, though.

Cathy Law’s Claw for the 23rd technically qualifies as an anthropomorphic-numerals joke, in this panel about the smothering of education by the infection of guns into American culture.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 23rd has wealthy child Wedgwick unsatisfied with a mere ball of snow. He instead has a snow Truncated Icosahedron (the hyphens in Jarvis’s word balloon may baffle the innocent reader). This is a real shape, one that’s been known for a very long time. It’s one of the Archimedean Solids, a set of 13 solids that have convex shapes (no holes or indents or anything) and have all vertices the same, the identical number of edges coming in to each point in the same relative directions. The truncated icosahedron you maybe also know as the soccer ball shape, at least for those old-style soccer balls made of patches that were hexagons and pentagons. An actual truncated icosahedron needs twelve pentagons, so the figure drawn in the third panel isn’t quite right. At least one pentagonal face would be visible. But that’s also tricky to draw. The aerodynamics of a truncated icosahedron are surely different from those of a sphere. But in snowball-fight conditions, probably not different enough to even notice.

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 24th uses a blackboard full of formulas to represent an overcomplicated answer. The formulas look, offhand, like gibberish to me. But I’ll admit uncertainty since the odd capitalization of “iG(p)” at the start makes me think of some deeper group theory or knot theory symbols. And to see an “m + p” and an “m – p” makes me think of quantum mechanics of atomic orbitals. (But then an “m – p2” is weird.) So if this were anything I’d say it was some quantum chemistry formula. But my gut says if Litzler did take the blackboard symbols from anything, it was without going back to references. (Which he has no need to do, I should point out; the joke wouldn’t be any stronger — or weaker — if the blackboard meant anything.)

## Reading the Comics, September 1, 2017: Getting Ready For School Edition

In the United States at least it’s the start of the school year. With that, Comic Strip Master Command sent orders to do back-to-school jokes. They may be shallow ones, but they’re enough to fill my need for content. For example:

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot for the 27th of August, a new strip, has Jason fitting his writing tools to the class’s theme. So mathematics gets to write “2” in a complicated way. The mention of a clay tablet and cuneiform is oddly timely, given the current (excessive) hype about that Babylonian tablet of trigonometric values, which just shows how even a nearly-retired cartoonist will get lucky sometimes.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 27th does a collage of school stuff, with mathematics the leading representative of the teacher-giving-a-lecture sort of class.

Olivia Walch’s Imogen Quest for the 28th uses calculus as the emblem of stuff that would be put on the blackboard and be essential for knowing. It’s legitimate formulas, so far as we get to see, the stuff that would in fact be in class. It’s also got an amusing, to me at least, idea for getting students’ attention onto the blackboard.

Tony Carrillo’s F Minus for the 29th is here to amuse me. I could go on to some excuse about how the sextant would be used for the calculations that tell someone where he is. But really I’m including it because I was amused and I like how detailed a sketch of a sextant Carrillo included here.

Jim Meddick’s Monty for the 29th features the rich obscenity Sedgwick Nuttingham III, also getting ready for school. In this case the summer mathematics tutoring includes some not-really-obvious game dubbed Integer Ball. I confess a lot of attempts to make games out of arithmetic look to me like this: fun to do but useful in practicing skills? But I don’t know what the rules are or what kind of game might be made of the integers here. I should at least hear it out.

Michael Cavna’s Warped for the 30th lists a top ten greatest numbers, spoofing on mindless clickbait. Cavna also, I imagine unintentionally, duplicates an ancient David Letterman Top Ten List. But it’s not like you can expect people to resist the idea of making numbered lists of numbers. Some of us have a hard time stopping.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 1st of September mentions a bunch of mathematics as serious studies. Also, to an extent, non-serious studies. I don’t remember my childhood well enough to say whether we found that vaguely-defined thrill in the word “algebra”. It seems plausible enough.