Reading the Comics, July 23, 2016: Familiar Friends Week Edition

This past week was refreshing. The mathematics comics appeared at a regular, none-too-excessive pace. And some old familiar friends reappeared. Some were comic strips that haven’t been around in a while. Some were jokes that haven’t been. Enjoy.

Bill Whitehead’s Free Range for the 17th is the first use of the meth/math lab pun to appear in the comics since September 2014 by my reckoning. And only the second in my Reading the Comics series. I’m surprised too. For all this goes around Twitter and other social media I’d imagine it to make the comics more.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater gets back in my review here for the first time since April, to my amazement. Used to be you couldn’t go two weeks without Hilburn looking for my attention. And here’s the first Roman Numerals joke since … I don’t quite feel up to checking just now. I’m going to go ahead and suppose it’s the first one since the last time Samson’s Dark Side Of The Horse was here.

It’s anachronistic to speak of Ancient Roman students getting ‘C’ grades. Of course it is; it could hardly be otherwise. It’s a joke; how much is that to be worried about? But if I haven’t been mislead the use of letters, A through E-or-F, in student evaluations is an American innovation of the late 19th century. It developed over the 20th century and took over at least American education, in conjunction with the 100-through-0 points evaluation scale. And in parallel to the Grade Point Average, typically with 4.0 as its highest score.

Samson’s Dark Side Of The Horse makes a comfortable visit back here on the 20th. It’s another counting-sheep and number-representation gag. I love the third panel’s artwork.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 22nd is a joke about motivating mathematics study. I believe I’ve mentioned this before, but there was a lovely bit on The Mary Tyler Moore Show along these lines once. Fantastically stupid newsman Ted Baxter was struggling to do some arithmetic until Murray Slaughter gave him the advice: “put a dollar sign in front of it”. Then he had the answer instantly.

Nat Fakes’s Break of Day for the 22nd brings back mathematics as signifier of the hardest homework a kid can have, or the toughest thing someone can have to think about. Fine enough stuff, although it isn’t really that stunning to think a parent might not understand what the kid’s homework is about. Often the point of an assignment is not to learn how to do something, but to encourage thinking about ways one could do something. That’s a hard assignment to create, and a harder one to do, and a very hard one to help with. As adults we get used to looking at problems as calculations to identify and do as swiftly as possible. That there is value in wandering around the slow routes needs remembering.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 22nd riffs on … I’m not sure exactly. The idea that the sort of meaningless nonsense that makes for good late-night dorm conversations when you’re 20 comes back around to being the cutting edge of theoretical physics, I suppose. It’s funny enough. A complaint often brought against the most cutting edge of theoretical physics is that it’s so abstract that there aren’t any conceivable tests that would say whether a calculation is right or not. In that condition mathematics and theoretical physics merge back into a thread of philosophy and its question of how can we know what it is for something to be true. Once we have a way of discerning whether an idea might happen to be true we’re ejected again from philosophy and into a science. And then the scientist makes a smug, snarky comment about the impossibility of testing philosophical conclusions.

Since the late 19th century much cutting-edge physics has involved counter-intuitive results. Often they have premises that strain intuition, as see relativity, or that seem to violate it altogether, as see quantum mechanics. But they turn out so very right so very often it’s hard not to feel excited and encouraged by this. Who wouldn’t look for a surprising and counter-intuitive explanation for the world as thrilling and maybe even right idea? I don’t blame anyone for looking to a wild idea like “what if the universe is made of math”. I don’t know what that would mean exactly unless we suppose we do live in a universe of Platonic Forms, in which case perfection runs counter-intuitively to me. I do understand being excited by the question. But the answers probably won’t be that much fun.

Reading the Comics, April 10, 2015: Getting Into The Story Problem Edition

I know it’s been like forever, or four days, since the last time I had a half-dozen or so mathematically themed comic strips to write about, but if Comic Strip Master Command is going to order cartoonists to give me stuff to write about I’m not going to turn them away. Several seemed to me about the struggle to get someone to buy into a story — the thing being asked after in a word problem, perhaps, or about the ways mathematics is worth knowing, or just how the mathematics in a joke’s setup are presented — and how skepticism about these things can turn up. So I’ll declare that the theme of this collection.

Steve Sicula’s Home And Away started a sequence on April 7th about “is math really important?”, with the father trying to argue that it’s so very useful. I’m not sure anyone’s ever really been convinced by the argument that “this is useful, therefore it’s important, therefore it’s interesting”. Lots of things are useful or important while staying fantastically dull to all but a select few souls. I would like to think a better argument for learning mathematics is that it’s beautiful, and astounding, and it allows you to discover new ways of studying the world; it can offer all the joy of any art, even as it has a practical side. Anyway, the sequence goes on for several days, and while I can’t say the arguments get very convincing on any side, they do allow for a little play with the fourth wall that I usually find amusing in comics which don’t do that much.