I’ve mentioned I like to have five or six comic strips for a Reading The Comics entry. On the 5th, it happens, I got a set of five all at once. Perhaps some are marginal for mathematics content but since when does that stop me? Especially when there’s the fun of a single-day Reading The Comics post to consider. So here goes:
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons is a student-resisting-the-problem joke. And it’s about long division. I can’t blame the student for resisting. Long division’s hard to learn. It’s probably the first bit of arithmetic in which you just have to make an educated guess for an answer and face possibly being wrong. And this is a problem that’ll have a remainder in it. I think I remember early on in long division finding a remainder left over feeling like an accusation. Surely if I’d done it right, the divisor would go into the original number a whole number of times, right? No, but you have to warm up to being comfortable with that.
Ted Key’s Hazel feels less charmingly out-of-date when you remember these are reruns. Ted Key — who created Peabody’s Improbable History as well as the sitcom based on this comic panel — retired in 1993. So Hazel’s attempt to create a less abstract version of the mathematics problem for Harold is probably relatively time-appropriate. And recasting a problem as something less abstract is often a good way to find a solution. It’s all right to do side work as a way to get the work you want to do.
John McNamee’s Pie Comic is a joke about the uselessness of mathematics. Tch. I wonder if the problem here isn’t the abstractness of a word like “hypotenuse”. I grant the word doesn’t evoke anything besides “hypotenuse”. But one irony is that hypotenuses are extremely useful things. We can use them to calculate how far away things are, without the trouble of going out to the spot. We can imagine post-apocalyptic warlords wanting to know how far things are, so as to better aim the trebuchets.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy is a rerun from 1928, of course. It’s also only marginally on point here. The mention of arithmetic is irrelevant to the joke. But it’s a fine joke and I wanted people to read it. Longtime readers know I’m a Skippy fan. (Saturday’s strip follows up on this. It’s worth reading too.)
Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead has picked up some quantum mechanics talk. At least he’s throwing around the sorts of things we see in pop science and, er, pop mathematical talk about the mathematics of cutting-edge physics. I’m not aware of any current models of everything which suppose there to be fourteen, or seventeen, dimensions of space. But high-dimension spaces are common points of speculation. Most of those dimensions appear to be arranged in ways we don’t see in the everyday world, but which leave behind mathematical traces. The crack about God not playing dice with the universe is famously attributed to Albert Einstein. Einstein was not comfortable with the non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics, that there is this essential randomness to this model of the world.
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