Reading the Comics, December 28, 2019: Running Out The 2010s Edition

And here’s the last four comic strips from the final full week of 2019. I have already picked a couple strips for the end of December to say at least something about. Those I intend to wait for Sunday to review, though. And, as with the strips from this past Sunday, these are too slight for me to write much about. That’s all right. I don’t need the extra workload of thinking this week.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 26th uses a blackboard of mathematics (as part of “understanding of particle physics”) as symbolic of intelligence. I’m not versed enough in particle physics to say whether the expressions make sense. I’m inclined toward it, since the first line has an integral of the reciprocal of the distance between a point x and a point x’. That looks to me like a calculation of some potential energy-related stuff.

Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and her Unicorn for the 27th uses “memorizing multiplication tables” as the sort of challenging and tedious task that a friend would not put another one through. The strip surprised me; I would have thought Phoebe the sort of kid who’d find multiplication tables, with their symmetry and teasing hints of structure (compare any number on the upper-left-to-lower-right diagonal to the numbers just up-and-right or down-and-left to it, for example), fascinating enough to memorize on their own.

Leigh Rubin’s Rubes for the 27th has a rat-or-mouse showing off one of those exciting calculations about how many rats-or-mice could breed in a year if absolutely nothing limited their growth. These sorts of calculations are fun for getting to big numbers in pretty little time. They’re only the first, loosest pieces of a model for anything’s population, though.

Pab Sungenis’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria for the 28th gets into the question about whether the new decade starts in 2020 or 2021. I wasn’t aware people were asking the question until a few weeks ago, when my father asked me for an authoritative answer. He respects my credentials as a mathematician and a calendar freak. The only answer I can defend, though, is to say of course a new decade starts in 2020. A new decade also starts in 2021. There’s also a decade starting in 2022. There’s a new decade starting five minutes from the moment you read this sentence. If you hurry you just might make it.

If you want to make any claims about “the” new decade, you have to say what you pick “the” to signify. Complete decades from the (proleptically defined) 1st of January, 1, is a compelling choice. “Years starting the 1st of January, 2020” is also a compelling choice. Decide your preference and you’ll decide your answer.

Thank you for reading, this essay and this whole year. 2020 is, of course, a leap year, or “bissextile year” if you want to establish your reputation as a calendar freak. Good luck.

Reading the Comics, May 4, 2019: Wednesday Looks A Lot Like Tuesday Edition

I didn’t get this published on Tuesday, owing to circumstances beyond my control, such as my not writing it Monday. I have hopes of catching up on all the writing I want to do. Someday, I might.

Marcus Hamilton and Scott Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace for the 2nd hardly seems like Dennis lives up to his “Menace” title. It seems more like he’s discovered wordplay. This is usually no worse than “mildly annoying”. Joey seems alarmed, but I must tell you, reader, he’s easily alarmed. But I think there is some depth here.

Marcus Hamilton and Scott Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace for the 2nd of May, 2019. This is twice in three months that this venerable comic’s made an appearance here. Who saw that coming? This and past appearances of Dennis the Menace are at this link. Future appearances should be, too, if they happen.

One is that, as we’ve thought of counting numbers, there is always “one more”. This doesn’t have to be. We could work with perfectly good number systems that have a largest number. We do, in fact. Every computer programming language has some largest integer that it will deal with. If you need a larger number, you have to do something clever. Your clever idea will let you address some range of bigger numbers, but it too will have a maximum. We’ve set those limits large enough that, usually, they’re not an inconvenience. They’re still there.

But those limits are forced on us by the many failings of matter. What when we get just past Plato’s line’s division, into the reasoning of pure mathematics? There we can set up counting numbers. The standard way to do this is to suppose there is a number “1”. And to suppose that, for any counting number we have, there is a successor, a number one-plus-that. If Joey were to ask why there has to be, all Dennis could do is shrug. This makes an axiom out of there always being one more. If you don’t like it, make some other arithmetic. Anyway we only understand any of this using fallible matter, so good luck.

This progression can be heady, though. The counting numbers are probably the most understandable infinitely large set there is. Thinking about them seriously can induce the sort of dizzy awe that pondering Deep Time or the vastness of space can do. That seems a bit above Dennis’s age level, but some people are stricken with the infinite sooner than others are.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Begins rerun for the 2nd of May, 2019. The strip originally ran the 23rd of March, 1951. When I have reason to discuss Peanuts, either the current-newspaper-reruns or these early-50s reruns, the essays should appear here.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts Begins rerun for the 2nd has Charlie Brown dismiss arithmetic as impractical. It fits the motif of mathematics as an unworldly subject. There’s the common joke that pure mathematics even dreams of being of no use to anyone. Arithmetic, though, has always been a practical subject. It introduces us to many abstract ideas, particularly group theory. This subject looks at what we can do with systems that work like arithmetic without necessarily having numbers, or anything that works with numbers.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 3rd of May, 2019. Other essays featuring by Wrong Hands are at this link.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 3rd is the Venn Diagram joke for the week. I’m not sure the logic of the joke quite holds up, but it’s funny at a glance and that’s as much as it needs to do.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 4th of May, 2019. The many essays discussing The Argyle Sweater appear at this link.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 4th is the anthropomorphic geometric figures joke for the week.

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And a couple of comic strips mentioned mathematics, although in too slight a way to discuss. Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and her Unicorn on the 30th of April started a sequence in which doodles on Phoebe’s homework came to life. That it’s mathematics homework was mostly incidental. I’m open to the argument that mathematics encourages doodling in a way that, say, spelling does not. I’d also be open to the argument you aren’t doing geometry if you don’t doodle. Anyway. Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 2nd of May features Sesame Street’s Count von Count. It’s a bit of wordplay on the use of “numbers” for songs. And, of course, the folkloric tradition of vampires as compulsive counters.

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With that, I’m temporarily caught up on my comics. I’m falling behind almost every week, though. Come Sunday, the next essay should appear here.

Reading the Comics, June 17, 2017: Icons Of Mathematics Edition

Comic Strip Master Command just barely missed being busy enough for me to split the week’s edition. Fine for them, I suppose, although it means I’m going to have to scramble together something for the Tuesday or the Thursday posting slot. Ah well. As befits the comics, there’s a fair bit of mathematics as an icon in the past week’s selections. So let’s discuss.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 11th is our Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for this essay. Kind of a relief to have that in right away. And while the cartoon shows a real disaster of a student at the chalkboard, there is some truth to the caption. Ruling out plausible-looking wrong answers is progress, usually. So is coming up with plausible-looking answers to work out whether they’re right or wrong. The troubling part here, I’d say, is that the kid came up with pretty poor guesses about what the answer might be. He ought to be able to guess that it’s got to be an odd number, and has to be less than 10, and really ought to be less than 7. If you spot that then you can’t make more than two wrong guesses.

Patrick J Marrin’s Francis for the 12th starts with what sounds like a logical paradox, about whether the Pope could make an infallibly true statement that he was not infallible. Really it sounds like a bit of nonsense. But the limits of what we can know about a logical system will often involve questions of this form. We ask whether something can prove whether it is provable, for example, and come up with a rigorous answer. So that’s the mathematical content which justifies my including this strip here.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 13th of June, 2017. Yes, yes, it’s easy to get people excited for the Revolution, but it’ll come to a halt when someone asks about how they get the groceries afterwards.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 13th is a traditional use of the blackboard full of mathematics as symbolic of intelligence. Of course ‘E = mc²‘ gets in there. I’m surprised that both π and 3.14 do, too, for as little as we see on the board.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 14th is a nice bit of reassurance. Maybe the cartoonist was worried this would be a split-week edition. The kid seems to be the same one as the 11th, but the teacher looks different. Anyway there’s a lot you can tell about shapes from their perimeter alone. The one which most startles me comes up in calculus: by doing the right calculation about the lengths and directions of the edge of a shape you can tell how much area is inside the shape. There’s a lot of stuff in this field — multivariable calculus — that’s about swapping between “stuff you know about the boundary of a shape” and “stuff you know about the interior of the shape”. And finding area from tracing the boundary is one of them. It’s still glorious.

Samson’s Dark Side Of The Horse for the 14th is a counting-sheep joke and a Pi Day joke. I suspect the digits of π would be horrible for lulling one to sleep, though. They lack the just-enough-order that something needs for a semiconscious mind to drift off. Horace would probably be better off working out Collatz sequences.

Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and her Unicorn for the 14th mentions mathematics as iconic of what you do at school. Book reports also make the cut.

Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon for the 31st of July, 1962, rerun the 16th of June, 2017. I am impressed that Dr Zarkov can make a TV set capable of viewing alternate universes. I still literally do not know how it is possible that we have sound for our new TV set, and I labelled and connected every single wire in the thing. Oh, wouldn’t it be a kick if Dr Zarkov has the picture from one alternate universe but the sound from a slightly different other one?

Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon for the 31st of July, 1962 and rerun the 16th I’m including just because I love the old-fashioned image of a mathematician in Professor Quita here. At this point in the comic strip’s run it was set in the far-distant future year of 1972, and the action here is on one of the busy multinational giant space stations. Flash himself is just back from Venus where he’d set up some dolphins as assistants to a fish-farming operation helping to feed that world and ours. And for all that early-60s futurism look at that gorgeous old adding machine he’s still got. (Professor Quinta’s discovery is a way to peer into alternate universes, according to the next day’s strip. I’m kind of hoping this means they’re going to spend a week reading Buck Rogers.)

Reading the Comics, March 6, 2017: Blackboards Edition

I can’t say there’s a compelling theme to the first five mathematically-themed comics of last week. Screens full of mathematics turned up in a couple of them, so I’ll run with that. There were also just enough strips that I’m splitting the week again. It seems fair to me and gives me something to remember Wednesday night that I have to rush to complete.

Jimmy Hatlo’s Little Iodine for the 1st of January, 1956 was rerun on the 5th of March. The setup demands Little Iodine pester her father for help with the “hard homework” and of course it’s arithmetic that gets to play hard work. It’s a word problem in terms of who has how many apples, as you might figure. Don’t worry about Iodine’s boss getting fired; Little Iodine gets her father fired every week. It’s their schtick.

Jimmy Hatlo’s Little Iodine for the 1st of January, 1956. I guess class started right back up the 2nd, but it would’ve avoided so much trouble if she’d done her homework sometime during the winter break. That said, I never did.

Dana Simpson’s Phoebe and her Unicorn for the 5th mentions the “most remarkable of unicorn confections”, a sugar dodecahedron. Dodecahedrons have long captured human imaginations, as one of the Platonic Solids. The Platonic Solids are one of the ways we can make a solid-geometry analogue to a regular polygon. Phoebe’s other mentioned shape of cubes is another of the Platonic Solids, but that one’s common enough to encourage no sense of mystery or wonder. The cube’s the only one of the Platonic Solids that will fill space, though, that you can put into stacks that don’t leave gaps between them. Sugar cubes, Wikipedia tells me, have been made only since the 19th century; the Moravian sugar factory director Jakub Kryštof Rad got a patent for cutting block sugar into uniform pieces in 1843. I can’t dispute the fun of “dodecahedron” as a word to say. Many solid-geometric shapes have names that are merely descriptive, but which are rendered with Greek or Latin syllables so as to sound magical.

Bud Grace’s Piranha Club for the 6th started a sequence in which the Future Disgraced Former President needs the most brilliant person in the world, Bud Grace. A word balloon full of mathematics is used as symbol for this genius. I feel compelled to point out Bud Grace was a physics major. But while Grace could as easily have used something from the physics department to show his deep thinking abilities, that would all but certainly have been rendered as equation and graphs, the stuff of mathematics again.

Bud Grace’s Piranha Club for the 6th of March, 2017. 241 times 635 is 153,035 by the way. I wouldn’t work that out in my head if I needed the number. I might work out an estimate of how big it was, in which case I’d do this: 241 is about 250, which is one-quarter of a thousand. One-quarter of 635 is something like 150, which times a thousand is 150,000. If I needed it exactly I’d get a calculator. Unless I just needed something to occupy my mind without having any particular emotional charge.

Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions rerun for the 6th is aptly titled, “How To Unify Newtonian Physics And Quantum Mechanics”. Meyer’s advice is not bad, really, although generic enough it applies to any attempts to reconcile two different models of a phenomenon. Also there’s not particularly a problem reconciling Newtonian physics with quantum mechanics. It’s general relativity and quantum mechanics that are so hard to reconcile.

Still, Basic Instructions is about how you can do a thing, or learn to do a thing. It’s not about how to allow anything to be done for the first time. And it’s true that, per quantum mechanics, we can’t predict exactly what any one particle will do at any time. We can say what possible things it might do and how relatively probable they are. But big stuff, the stuff for which Newtonian physics is relevant, involve so many particles that the unpredictability becomes too small to notice. We can see this as the Law of Large Numbers. That’s the probability rule that tells us we can’t predict any coin flip, but we know that a million fair tosses of a coin will not turn up 800,000 tails. There’s more to it than that (there’s always more to it), but that’s a starting point.

Michael Fry’s Committed rerun for the 6th features Albert Einstein as the icon of genius. Natural enough. And it reinforces this with the blackboard full of mathematics. I’m not sure if that blackboard note of “E = md³” is supposed to be a reference to the famous Far Side panel of Einstein hearing the maid talk about everything being squared away. I’ll take it as such.