I know; I’m more than a week behind the original publication of these strips. The Playful Math Education Blog Carnival took a lot of what attention I have these days. I’ll get caught up again soon enough. Comic Strip Master Command tried to help me, by having the close of a week ago being pretty small mathematics mentions, too. For example:
Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli’s Archie for the 27th has Moose struggling in mathematics this term. This is an interesting casual mention; the joke, of Moose using three words to describe a thing he said he could in two, would not fit sharply for anything but mathematics. Or, possibly, a measuring class, but there’s no high school even in fiction that has a class in measuring.
Bud Blake’s Vintage Tiger for the 27th has Tiger and Hugo struggling to find adjective forms for numbers. We can giggle at Hugo struggling for “quadruple” and going for something that makes more sense. We all top out somewhere, though, probably around quintuple or sextuple. I have never known anyone who claimed to know what the word would be for anything past decuple, and even staring at the dictionary page for “decuple” I don’t feel confident in it.
Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 28th uses a blackboard full of calculations as shorthand for real insight into science. From context they’re likely working on some physics problem and it’s quite hard to do that without mathematics, must agree.
John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 28th name-drops slide rules, which, yeah, have mostly historical or symbolic importance these days. There might be some niche where they’re particularly useful (besides teaching logarithms), but I don’t know of it.
There’s some comic strips that get mentioned here all the time. Then there’s comic strips that I have been reading basically my whole life, and that never give me a thread to talk about. Although I’ve been reading comic strips for their mathematics content for a long while now, somehow, I am still surprised when these kinds of comic strip are not the same thing. So here’s the end of last week’s comics, almost in time for next week to start:
Kevin Fagan’s Drabble for the 28th has Penny doing “math” on colors. Traditionally I use an opening like this to mention group theory. In that we study things that can be added together, in ways like addition works on the integers. Colors won’t quite work like this, unfortunately. A group needs an element that’s an additive identity. This works like zero: it can be added to anything without changing its value. There isn’t a color that you can mix with other colors that leaves the other color unchanged, though. Even white or clear will dilute the original color.
If you’ve thought of the clever workaround, that each color can be the additive identity to itself, you get credit for ingenuity. Unfortunately, to be a group there has to be a lone additive identity. Having more than one makes a structure that’s so unlike the integers that mathematicians won’t stand for it. I also don’t know of any interesting structures that have more than one additive identity. This suggests that nobody has found a problem that they represent well. But the strip suggests maybe it could tell us something useful for colors. I don’t know.
Tom Armstrong’s Marvin for the 28th is a strip which follows from the discovery that “fake news” is a thing that people say. Here the strip uses a bit of arithmetic as the sort of incontrovertibly true thing that Marvin is dumb to question. Well, that 1 + 1 equals 2 is uncontrovertibly true, unless we are looking at some funny definitions of ‘1’ or ‘plus’ or something. I remember, as a kid, being quite angry with a book that mentioned “one cup of popcorn plus one cup of water does not give us two cups of soggy popcorn”, although I didn’t know how to argue the point.
Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes with Orange for the 30th is … well, I’m in this picture and I don’t like it. I come from a long line of people who cover every surface with stuff. But as for what surface area is? … Well, there’s a couple of possible definitions. One that I feel is compelling is to think of covering sets. Take a shape that’s set, by definition, to have an area of 1 unit of area. What is the smallest number of those unit shapes which will cover the original shape? Cover is a technical term here. But also, here, the ordinary English word describes what we need it for. How many copies of the unit shape do you need to exactly cover up the whole original shape? That’s your area. And this fits to the mother’s use of surfaces in the comic strip neatly enough.
Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff for the 31st is a rerun of vintage unknown to me. I’m not sure whether it’s among the digitally relettered strips. The lettering’s suspiciously neat, but, for example, there’s at least three different G’s in there. Anyway, it’s an old joke about adding together enough gas-saving contraptions that it uses less than zero gas. So far as it’s tenable at all, it comes from treating percentage savings from different schemes as additive, instead of multiplying together. Also, I suppose, that the savings are independent, that (in this case) Jeff’s new gas saving ten percent still applies even with the special spark plugs or the new carburettor [sic]. The premise is also probably good for a word problem, testing out understanding of percentages and multiplication, which is just a side observation here.
This wraps up last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. This week I can tell you already was a bonanza week. When I start getting to its comics I should have an essay at this link. Thanks for reading.
I hoped I’d get a Reading the Comics post in for Tuesday, and even managed it. With this I’m all caught up to the syndicated comic strips which, last week, brought up some mathematics topic. I’m open for nominations about what to publish here Thursday. Write in quick.
Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 30th is a struggling-student joke. And set in summer school, so the comic can be run the last day of June without standing out to its United States audience. It expresses a common anxiety, about that point when mathematics starts using letters. It superficially seems strange that this change worries students. Students surely had encountered problems where some term in an equation was replaced with a blank space and they were expected to find the missing term. This is the same work as using a letter. Still, there are important differences. First is that a blank line (box, circle, whatever) has connotations of “a thing to be filled in”. A letter seems to carry meaning in to the problem, even if it’s just “x marks the spot”. And a letter, as we use it in English, always stands for the same thing (or at least the same set of things). That ‘x’ may be 7 in one problem and 12 in another seems weird. I mean weird even by the standards of English orthography.
A letter might represent a number whose value we wish to know; it might represent a number whose value we don’t care about. These are different ideas. We usually fall into a convention where numbers we wish to know are more likely x, y, and z, while those we don’t care about are more likely a, b, and c. But even that’s no reliable rule. And there may be several letters in a single equation. It’s one thing to have a single unknown number to deal with. To have two? Three? I don’t blame people fearing they can’t handle that.
Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy for the 30th has Billy and Cow pondering the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is one of the first examples someone encounters in game theory. Game theory sounds like the most fun part of mathematics. It’s the study of situations in which there’s multiple parties following formal rules which allow for gains or losses. This is an abstract description. It means many things fit a mathematician’s idea of a game.
Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 30th of June, 2019. The comic strip is long since ended, but hasn’t quite rerun enough times for me to get tired of it. So essays featuring Cow and Boy appear this link. The gnome is a lawn gnome who came to life and … you know, this was a pretty weird comic and I understand why it didn’t make it in the newspapers. Just roll with it.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is described well enough by Billy. It’s built on two parties, each — separately and without the ability to coordinate — having to make a choice. Both would be better off, under interrogation, to keep quiet and trust that the cops can’t get anything significant on them. But both have the temptation that if they rat out the other, they’ll get off free while their former partner gets screwed. And knowing that their partner has the same temptation. So what would be best for the two of them requires them both doing the thing that maximizes their individual risk. The implication is unsettling: everyone acting in their own best interest is supposed to produce the best possible result for society. And here, for the society of these two accused, it breaks down entirely.
Exponents have been written as numbers in superscript following a base for a long while now. The notation developed over the 17th century. I don’t know why mathematicians settled on superscripts, as opposed to the many other ways a base and an exponent might fit together. It’s a good mnemonic to remember, say, “z raised to the 10th” is z with a raised 10. But I don’t know the etymology of “raised” in a mathematical context well enough. It’s plausible that we say “raised” because that’s what the notation suggests.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 2nd argues for the beauty of mathematics as a use for it. It’s presented in a brutal manner, but saying brutal things to kids is a comic motif with history to it. Well, in an existentialist manner, but that gets pretty brutal quickly.
The proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is one of the very many known to humanity. This one is among the family of proofs that are wordless. At least nearly wordless. You can get from here to with very little prompting. If you do need prompting, it’s this: there are two expressions for how much area of the square with sides a-plus-b. One of these expressions uses only terms of a and b. The other expression uses terms of a, b, and c. If this doesn’t get a bit of a grin out of you, don’t worry. There’s, like, 2,037 other proofs we already know about. We might ask whether we need quite so many proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. It doesn’t seem to be under serious question most of the time.
And then a couple comic strips last week just mentioned mathematics. Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals for the 1st of July has the kids trying to understand their mathematics homework. Could have been anything. Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue for the 5th started a sequence with the kids at Math Camp. The comic is trying quite hard to get me riled up. So far it’s been the kids agreeing that mathematics is the worst, and has left things at that. Hrmph.
When I collected last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips I thought this set an uninspiring one. That changed sometime while I wrote. That’s the sort of week I like to have.
Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 28th is a repeat; all these strips are. And I’ve featured it here before too. But never before in color, so I’ll take this chance to show it one last time. One of the depicted plants is the “Non-Euclidean Creeper”, which “ignores the geometry of the space-time continuum”. Non-Euclidean is one of those few geometry-related words that people recognize — maybe even only learn — in their adulthood. It has connotations of the bizarre and the weird and the wrong.
And it is a bit weird. While we live in a non-Euclidean space, we never really notice. Euclidean space is the geometry we’re used to from drawing shapes on paper and putting boxes in the corners of basements. And from this we’ve given “non-Euclidean” this sinister reputation. We credit it with defying common sense and even logic itself, although it’s geometry. It can’t defy logic. It can defy intuition. Non-Euclidean geometries have the idea that there are no such things as parallel lines. Or the idea that there are too many parallel lines. And it can get to weird results, particularly if we look at more than three dimensions of space. Those also tax the imagination. It will get a weed a bad reputation.
Chen Weng’s Messycow Comics for the 30th is about a child’s delight in learning how to count. I don’t remember ever being so fascinated by counting that it would distract me permanently. I do remember thinking it was amazing that once a pattern was established it kept on, with no reason to ever stop, or even change. My recollection is I thought this somehow unfair to the alphabet, which had a very sudden sharp end.
The counting numbers — counting in general — seem to be things we’ve evolved to understand. Other animals know how to count. Here I recommend again Stanislas Dehaene’s The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, which describes some of the things we know about how animals do mathematics. It also describes how children come to understand it.
Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 31st is a bit of play with arithmetic. Horace simplifies his problem by catching all the numerals with loops in them — the zeroes and the eights — and working with what’s left. Evidently he’s already cast out all the nines. (This is me making a joke. Casting out nines is a simple checksum that you can do which can guard against some common arithmetic mistakes. It doesn’t catch everything. But it is simple enough to do that it can be worth using.)
The part that disappoints me is that to load the problem up with digits with loops, we get a problem that’s not actually hard: 100 times anything is easy. If the problem were, say, 189 times 80008005 then you’d have a problem someone might sensibly refuse to do. But without those zeroes at the start it’d be harder to understand what Horace was doing. Maybe if it were 10089 times 800805 instead.
Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes with Orange for the 1st is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. Also the anthropomorphic letters joke. The capital B sees occasional use in mathematics. It can represent the ball, that is, the set of all points that represent the interior of a sphere of a set radius. Usually a radius of 1. It also sometimes appears in equations as a parameter, a number whose value is fixed for the length of the problem but whose value we don’t care about. I had thought there were a few other roles for B alone, such as a label to represent the Bessel functions. These are a family of complicated-looking polynomials with some nice properties it’s too great a diversion for me to discuss just now. But they seem to more often be labelled with a capital J for reasons that probably seemed compelling at the time. It’ll also get used in logic, where B might stand for the second statement of some argument. 4, meanwhile, is that old familiar thing.
This clears out last week’s comic strips. This present week’s strips should be at this link on Sunday. I haven’t yet read Friday or Saturday’s comics, so perhaps there’s been a flood, but this has been a slow week so far.
After that busy start last Sunday, Comic Strip Master Command left only a few things for the rest of the week. Here’s everything that seemed worthy of some comment to me:
Alex Hallatt’s Arctic Circle for the 12th is an arithmetic cameo. It’s used as the sort of thing that can be tested, with the straightforward joke about animal testing to follow. It’s not a surprise that machines should be able to do arithmetic. We’ve built machines for centuries to do arithmetic. Literally; Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz designed and built a calculating machine able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. This accomplishment from one of the founders of integral calculus is a potent reminder of how much we can accomplish if we’re supposed to be writing instead. (That link is to Robert Benchley’s classic essay “How To Get Things Done”. It is well worth reading, both because it is funny and because it’s actually good, useful advice.)
But it’s also true that animals do know arithmetic. At least a bit. Not — so far as we know — to the point they ponder square roots and such. But certainly to count, to understand addition and subtraction roughly, to have some instinct for calculations. Stanislas Dehaene’s The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics is a fascinating book about this. I’m only wary about going deeper into the topic since I don’t know a second (and, better, third) pop book touching on how animals understand mathematics. I feel more comfortable with anything if I’ve encountered it from several different authors. Anyway it does imply the possibility of testing a polar bear’s abilities at arithmetic, only in the real world.
Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County rerun for the 13th has another mathematics cameo. Geometry’s a subject worthy of stoking Binkley’s anxieties, though. It has a lot of definitions that have to be carefully observed. And while geometry reflects the understanding we have of things from moving around in space, it demands a precision that we don’t really have an instinct for. It’s a lot to worry about.
Terry Border’s Bent Objects for the 15th is our Venn Diagram joke for the week. I like this better than I think the joke deserves, probably because it is done in real materials. (Which is the Bent Objects schtick; it’s always photographs of objects arranged to make the joke.)
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 15th is a joke on knowing how far to travel but not what direction. Normal human conversations carry contextually reasonable suppositions. Told something is two miles away, it’s probably along the major road you’re on, or immediately nearby. I’d still ask for clarification told something was “two miles away”. Two blocks, I’d let slide, on the grounds that it’s no big deal to correct a mistake.
Still, mathematicians carry defaults with them too. They might be open to a weird, general case, certainly. But we have expectations. There’s usually some obvious preferred coordinate system, or directions. If it’s important that we be ready for alternatives we highlight that. We specify the coordinate system we want. Perhaps we specify we’re taking that choice “without loss of generality”, that is, without supposing some other choice would be wrong.
I noticed the mathematician’s customized plate too. “EIPI1” is surely a reference to the expression . That sum, it turns out, equals zero. It reflects this curious connection between exponentiation, complex-valued numbers, and the trigonometric functions. It’s a weird thing to know is true, and it’s highly regarded in certain nerd circles for that weirdness.
Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 16th features a what-are-the-odds sort of joke, this one about being struck by a bolt from the sky. Lightning’s the iconic bolt to strike someone, and be surprising about it. Fabric would be no less surprising, though. And there’s no end of stories of weird things falling from the skies. It’s easier to get stuff into the sky than you might think, and there are only a few options once that’s happened.
Through the end of December my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z continues. I’m still open for topics to discuss from the last half-dozen letters of the alphabet. Even if someone’s already given a word for some letter, suggest something anyway. You might inspire me in good ways.
There were a bunch of mathematically-themed comic strips this past week. A lot of them are ones I’d seen before. One of them is a bit risque and I’ve put that behind a cut. This saves me the effort of thinking up a good nonsense name to give this edition, so there’s that going for me too.
Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 24th of May ought to have run last Sunday, but I wasn’t able to make time to write about it. It’s part of a sequence of Jason tutoring Paige in geometry. She’s struggling with the areas of common shapes which is relatable. Many of these area formulas could be kept straight by thinking back to rectangles. The size of the area is equal to the length of the base times the length of the height. From that you could probably reason right away the area of a trapezoid. It would have the same area as a rectangle with a base of length the mean length of the trapezoid’s different-length sides. The parallelogram works like the rectangle, length of the base times the length of the height. That you can convince yourself of by imagining the parallelogram. Then imagine slicing a right triangle off one of its sides. Move that around to the other side. Put it together right and you have a rectangle. Already know the area of a rectangle. The triangle, then, you can get by imagining two triangles of the same size and shape. Rotate one of the triangles 180 degrees. Slide it over, so the two triangles touch. Do this right and you have a parallelogram and so you know the area. The triangle’s half the area of that parallelogram.
The circle, I don’t know. I think just remember that if someone says “pi” they’re almost certainly going to follow it with either “r squared” or “day”. One of those suggests an area; the other doesn’t. Best I can do.
Allison Barrows’s PreTeena rerun for the 27th discusses self-esteem as though it were a good thing that children ought to have. This is part of the strip’s work to help build up the Old Person Complaining membership that every comics section community group relies on. But. There is mathematics in Jeri’s homework. Not mathematics in the sense of something particular to calculate. There’s just nothing to do there. But it is mathematics, and useful mathematics, to work out the logic of how to satisfy multiple requirements. Or, if it’s impossible to satisfy them all at once, then to come as near satisfying them as possible. These kinds of problems are considered optimization or logistics problems. Most interesting real-world examples are impossibly hard, or at least become impossibly hard before you realize it. You can make a career out of doing as best as possible in the circumstances.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts rerun for the 27th features an extended discussion by Lucy about the nature of … well, she explicitly talks about “nothing”. Is she talking about zero? Probably; you have to get fairly into mathematics or philosophy to start worrying about the difference between the number zero and the idea of nothing. In Algebra, mathematicians learn to work with systems of things that work like numbers enough that you can add and subtract and multiply them together, without committing to the idea that they’re working with numbers. They will have something that works like zero, though, a “nothing” that can be added to or subtracted from anything without changing it. And for which multiplication turns something into that “nothing”.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts rerun for the 27th of May, 2018. It originally ran the 30th of May, 1971. This strip originally ran during a time when, in-continuity, the Little Red-Haired Girl had moved away and Charlie Brown was coping with having never spoken to her. At some point she moved back, possibly because Schulz felt he had done everything he could with that or possibly because he forgot she had moved away.
I’m with Charlie Brown in not understanding where Lucy was going with all this, though. Maybe she lost the thread herself.
Mark Anderson’sAndertoons for the 28th is Mark Anderson’sAndertoons for the week. Wavehead’s worried about the verbs of both squaring and rounding numbers. Will say it’s a pair of words with contrary alternate meanings that I hadn’t noticed before. I have always taken the use of “square” to reflect, well, if you had a square with sides of size 4, then you’d have a square with area of size 16. The link seems obvious and logical. So on reflection that’s probably not at all where English gets it from. I mean, not to brag or anything but I’ve been speaking English all my life. If I’ve learned anything about it, it’s that the origin is probably something daft like “while Tisquantum [Squanto] was in England he impressed locals with his ability to do arithmetic and his trick of multiplying one number by itself got nicknamed squantuming, which got shortened to squaning to better fit the meter in a music-hall song about him, and a textbook writer in 1704 thought that was a mistake and `corrected’ it to squaring and everyone copied that”. I’m not even going to venture a guess about the etymology of “rounding”.
Marguerite Dabaie and Tom Hart’s Ali’s House for the 28th sets up a homework-help session over algebra. Can’t say where exactly Maisa is going wrong. Her saying “x equals 30 but the train equals” looks like trouble to me. It’s often good practice to start by writing out what are the things in the problem that seem important. And what symbol one wants each to mean. And what one knows about the relationship between these things. It helps clarify why someone would want to do that instead of something else. This is a new comic strip tag and I don’t think I’ve ever had cause to discuss it before.
Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 29th is a Rubik’s Cube joke. I’ve counted that as mathematical enough, usually. The different ways that you can rotate parts of the cube form a group. This is something like what I mentioned in the Peanuts discussion. The different rotations you can do can be added to or subtracted from each other, the way numbers can. (Multiplication I’m wary about.)
And now I can bring last week’s mathematically-themed comics into consideration here. Including the whole images hasn’t been quite as much work as I figured. But that’s going to change, surely. One of about four things I know about life is that if you think you’ve got your workflow set up to where you can handle things you’re about to be surprised. Can’t wait to see how this turns out.
Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s Wizard of Id for the 22nd is a statistics joke. Really a demographics joke. Which still counts; much of the historical development of statistics was in demographics. That it was possible to predict accurately the number of people in a big city who’d die, and what from, without knowing anything about whether any particular person would die was strange and astounding. It’s still an astounding thing to look directly at.
Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes with Orange for the 23rd has the form of a story problem. I could imagine turning this into a proper story problem. You’d need some measure of how satisfying the 50-dollar wines are versus the 5-dollar wines. Also how much the wines affect people’s ability to notice the difference. You might be able to turn this into a differential equations problem, but that’s probably overkill.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 23rd is Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for this half of the week. It’s a student-avoiding-the-problem joke. Could be any question. But arithmetic has the advantages of being plausible, taking up very little space to render, and not confusing the reader by looking like it might be part of the joke.
John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Working Daze for the 23rd has another cameo appearance by arithmetic. It’s also a cute reminder that there’s no problem you can compose that’s so simple someone can’t over-think it. And it puts me in mind of the occasional bit where a company’s promotional giveaway will technically avoid being a lottery by, instead of awarding prizes, awarding the chance to demonstrate a skill. Demonstration of that skill, such as a short arithmetic quiz, gets the prize. It’s a neat bit of loophole work and does depend, as the app designers here do, on the assumption there’s some arithmetic that people can be sure of being able to do.
Teresa Burritt’s Frog Applause for the 24th is its usual bit of Dadist nonsense. But in the talk about black holes it throws in an equation: . This is some mathematics about black holes, legitimate and interesting. It is the entropy of a black hole. The dazzling thing about this is all but one of those symbols on the right is the same for every black hole. ‘c’ is the speed of light, as in ‘E = mc2‘. G is the gravitational constant of the universe, a measure of how strong gravity is. is Planck’s constant, a kind of measure of how big quantum mechanics effects are. ‘k’ is the Boltzmann constant, which normal people never heard of but that everyone in physics and chemistry knows well. It’s what you multiply by to switch from the temperature of a thing to the thermal energy of the thing, or divide by to go the other way. It’s the same number for everything in the universe.
The only thing custom to a particular black hole is ‘A’, which is the surface area of the black hole. I mean the surface area of the event horizon. Double the surface area of the event horizon and you double its entropy. (This isn’t doubling the radius of the event horizon, but you know how much growth in the radius it is.) Also entropy. Hm. Everyone who would read this far into a pop mathematics blog like this knows that entropy is “how chaotic a thing is”. Thanks to people like Boltzmann we can be quantitative, and give specific and even exact numbers to the entropy of a system. It’s still a bit baffling since, superficially, a black hole seems like it’s not at all chaotic. It’s a point in space that’s got some mass to it, and maybe some electric charge and maybe some angular momentum. That’s about it. How messy can that be? It doesn’t even have any parts. This is how we can be pretty sure there’s stuff we don’t understand about black holes yet. Also about entropy.
This strip might be an oblique and confusing tribute to Dr Stephen Hawking. The entropy formula described was demonstrated by Drs Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking in the mid-1970s. Or it might be coincidence.
And this should clear out last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. I didn’t realize just how busy last week had been until I looked at what I thought was a backlog of just two days’ worth of strips and it turned out to be about two thousand comics. I exaggerate, but as ever, not by much. This current week seems to be a more relaxed pace. So I’ll have to think of something to write for the Tuesday and Thursday slots. Hm. (I’ll be all right. I’ve got one thing I need to stop bluffing about and write, and there’s usually a fair roundup of interesting tweets or articles I’ve seen that I can write. Those are often the most popular articles around here.)
Hilary Price and Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes with Orange for the 1st of February, 2018. All right, but they’re line segments, but I suppose you can’t reasonably draw infinitely vast things in a daily newspaper strip’s space. The lean of that triangle makes it look way more skeptical, even afraid, than I think Price and Piccolo intended, but I’m not sure there’s a better way to get these two in frame without making the composition weird.
Mark Tatulli’s Heart of the City rerun for the 1st finally has some specific mathematics mentioned in Heart’s efforts to avoid a mathematics tutor. The bit about the sum of adjacent angles forming a right line being 180 degrees is an important one. A great number of proofs rely on it. I can’t deny the bare fact seems dull, though. I know offhand, for example, that this bit about adjacent angles comes in handy in proving that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. At least for Euclidean geometry. And there are non-Euclidean geometries that are interesting and important and for which that’s not true. Which inspires the question: on a non-Euclidean surface, like say the surface of the Earth, is it that adjacent angles don’t add up to 180 degrees? Or does something else in the proof of a triangle’s interior angles adding up to 180 degrees go wrong?
Bill Whitehead’s Free Range for the 2nd features the classic page full of equations to demonstrate some hard mathematical work. And it is the sort of subject that is done mathematically. The equations don’t look to me anything like what you’d use for asteroid orbit projections. I’d expect forecasting just where an asteroid might hit the Earth to be done partly by analytic formulas that could be done on a blackboard. And then made precise by a numerical estimate. The advantage of the numerical estimate is that stuff like how air resistance affects the path of something in flight is hard to deal with analytically. Numerically, it’s tedious, but we can let the computer deal with the tedium. So there’d be just a boring old computer screen to show on-panel.
Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff reprint for the 2nd is a little baffling. And not really mathematical. It’s just got a bizarre arithmetic error in it. Mutt’s fiancee Encee wants earrings that cost ten dollars (each?) and Mutt takes this to be fifty dollars in earring costs and I have no idea what happened there. Thomas K Dye, the web cartoonist who’s done artwork for various article series, has pointed out that the lettering on these strips have been redone with a computer font. (Look at the letters ‘S’; once you see it, you’ll also notice it in the slightly lumpy ‘O’ and the curly-arrow ‘G’ shapes.) So maybe in the transcription the earring cost got garbled? And then not a single person reading the finished product read it over and thought about what they were doing? I don’t know.
Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reprint for the 2nd is based, as his efforts to get my attention often are, on a real mathematical physics postulate. As the woman postulates: given a deterministic universe, with known positions and momentums of every particle, and known forces for how all these interact, it seems like it should be possible to predict the future perfectly. It would also be possible to “retrodict” the past. All the laws of physics that we know are symmetric in time; there’s no reason you can’t predict the motion of something one second into the past just as well as you an one second into the future. This fascinating observation took a lot of battery in the 19th century. Many physical phenomena are better described by statistical laws, particularly in thermodynamics, the flow of heat. In these it’s often possible to predict the future well but retrodict the past not at all.
But that looks as though it’s a matter of computing power. We resort to a statistical understanding of, say, the rings of Saturn because it’s too hard to track the billions of positions and momentums we’d need to otherwise. A sufficiently powerful mathematician, for example God, would be able to do that. Fair enough. Then came the 1890s. Henri Poincaré discovered something terrifying about deterministic systems. It’s possible to have chaos. A mathematical representation of a system is a bit different from the original system. There’s some unavoidable error. That’s bound to make some, larger, error in any prediction of its future. For simple enough systems, this is okay. We can make a projection with an error as small as we need, at the cost of knowing the current state of affairs with enough detail. Poincaré found that some systems can be chaotic, though, ones in which any error between the current system and its representation will grow to make the projection useless. (At least for some starting conditions.) And so many interesting systems are chaotic. Incredibly simplified models of the weather are chaotic; surely the actual thing is. This implies that God’s projection of the universe would be an amusing but almost instantly meaningless toy. At least unless it were a duplicate of the universe. In which case we have to start asking our philosopher friends about the nature of identity and what a universe is, exactly.
Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 2nd is an installment of Guy Walks Into A Bar featuring what looks like an arithmetic problem to start. It takes a turn into base-ten jokes. There are times I suspect Ruben Bolling to be a bit of a nerd.
Nate Fakes’s Break of Day for the 3rd looks like it’s trying to be an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. At least it’s an anthropomorphic something joke.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 3rd originally ran the 8th of December, 1930. It alludes to one of those classic probability questions: what’s the chance that in your lungs is one of the molecules exhaled by Julius Caesar in his dying gasp? Or whatever other event you want: the first breath you ever took, or something exhaled by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount, or exhaled by Sue the T-Rex as she died. Whatever. The chance is always surprisingly high, which reflects the fact there’s a lot of molecules out there. This also reflects a confidence that we can say one molecule of air is “the same” as some molecule if air in a much earlier time. We have to make that supposition to have a problem we can treat mathematically. My understanding is chemists laugh at us if we try to suggest this seriously. Fair enough. But whether the air pumped out of a bicycle tire is ever the same as what’s pumped back in? That’s the same kind of problem. At least some of the molecules of air will be the same ones. Pretend “the same ones” makes sense. Please.
Comic Strip Master Command apparently wants everybody to have a quiet time ahead of Christmas. How quiet? Quiet enough that I’m including a strip I skipped last week and probably shouldn’t have. Here goes.
Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 15th was an installment of Uncle Cap’n’s Puzzle Pontoon, an activity puzzle that’s always about Uncle Cap’n running some low-competence scam. In this case the scam is bitcoins, which makes me wonder how old this particular panel rerun is. (I thought I saw a bitcoin joke in Barney Google, mind, although I can’t find the reference to prove it.)
I don’t feel confident that I understand the full mathematics behind the scheme, so I’ll pass on that. I can talk about the SHA-256 Hash Function and what it’s for, though. To be part of the bitcoin process your computer needs to do two things: it has to do some computing work, and it has to convince other computers that it’s done that. The trick is to prove it was done without giving the original work away. The answer is one that humans have known for centuries. Probably millennia. Possibly since the invention of secrets. To show you’re in on a secret, publicize something that makes no sense except to other people who know the secret. A hash is one way to do it.
It’s a function which matches a string of numbers that represent your original message to the real numbers. It should be easy to make the hash from the original string. But it should be hard to go from the hash back to the original string. So then you can publicize the hash of whatever your secret is. And someone else can know that they have the same secret by checking whether it hashes to the same number. (I’m reminded of how Galileo secured his priority of the discovery that Venus shows phases by writing a short sentence describing the phenomenon, and then publicizing an anagram of it. The anagram made no sense, but if you knew his original message you verify that yes, indeed, he did publicize that string of letters. I suppose that’s not properly a hash, but it serves much the same role.) It’s an easy enough way to add some authentication to a message, and to make it more tamper-proof. Hash functions for this kind of security are believed to be reasonably collision-proof. It might be possible to find two original messages with the same hash. But we believe it would take so long to do that it would be more effective to just break into your target’s house and steal their computer instead of counterfeiting the message.
Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange for the 17th is a joke about the uselessness of Algebra 2. It’s a joke of a kind with jokes about philosophy professors having jobs training students to be philosophy professors (a joke mathematicians get too, come to think of it). I’m a bit more sympathetic to joking about Algebra 2, rather than Algebra at all. There are some classes with a purpose that doesn’t seem quite clear. I’m more likely to name pre-algebra as a course whose purpose I can’t quite pin down. Algebra 2 I would, generically, expect to cover stuff like functions of several variables that you’re prepared for the first time you take Algebra, and you should be comfortable with before you start Calculus (or Pre-Calculus), but that aren’t essential to knowing algebra in the first place.
Sam Hurt’s Eyebeam for the 18th is the anthropomorphic numerals segment for this slow week and makes literal an ancient joke. Incidentally, has anyone else been seeing the follow-up joke on their social media feeds? I don’t remember seeing it before about two months ago. (The follow up is, why was it that seven ate nine? … Because one should eat three-square meals a day.)
Comic Strip Master Command hasn’t had many comics exactly on mathematical points the past week. I’ll make do. There are some that are close enough for me, since I like the comics already. And enough of them circle around people being nervous about doing mathematics that I have a title for this edition.
Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 24th talks about math anxiety. It’s not a comic strip that will do anything to resolve anyone’s mathematics anxiety. But it’s funny about its business. Agnes usually is; it’s one of the less-appreciated deeply-bizarre comics out there.
John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 24th might be the anthropomorphic numerals joke for this week. Or it might be the anthropomorphic letters joke. Or something else entirely.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts for the 24th reruns the comic from the 2nd of November, 1970. It has Sally discovering that multiplication is much easier than she imagined. As it is, she’s not in good shape. But if you accept ‘tooty-two’ as another name for ‘four’ and ‘threety-three’ as another name for ‘nine’, why not? And she might do all right in group theory. In that you can select a bunch of things, called ‘elements’, and describe their multiplication to fit anything you like, provided there’s consistency. There could be a four-forty-four if that seems to answer some question.
Steve Kelley and Jeff Parker’s Dustin for the 25th of October, 2017. The kid’s premise this week is about advice for maximizing trick-or-treating hauls. So it circles around sabermetrics and the measurement of every possible metric relevant to a situation. It’s a bit baffling to me, since I just do not remember the quality of a costume relating to how much candy I’d gotten. Nor to what I give out, at least once you get past “high school kid not even bothering to dress up”. And even they’ll get a couple pieces although, yeah, if they did anything they’d get the full-size peanut butter cups. (We’re trying to build a reputation here.) What I’m saying is, I don’t see how the amount of candy depends on more than “have a costume” and “spend more time out there”. I mean, are people really withholding the fruit-flavored Tootsie Rolls because some eight-year-old doesn’t have an exciting enough costume? Really?
Steve Kelley and Jeff Parker’s Dustin for the 25th might be tied in to mathematics anxiety. At least it expresses how the thought of mathematics will cause some people to shut down entirely. Shame for them, but I can’t deny it’s so.
Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange for the 26th of October, 2017. The signature also credits Rina Piccolo, late of Six Chix and Tina’s Groove. The latter strip ended in July 2017, and she left the former last year. Maybe she’s picking up some hours part-timing on Rhymes With Orange; her signature’s been on many strips recently. Wikipedia doesn’t have anything relevant to say, and the credit on the web site doesn’t reflect Piccolo’s work, if she is a regular coauthor now.
Hilary Price’s Rhymes with Orange for the 26th is a calculator joke, made explicitly magical. I’m amused but also wonder if those are small wizards or large mushrooms. And it brings up again the question: why do mathematics teachers care about seeing how you got the answer? Who cares, as long as the answer is right? And my answer there is that yeah, sometimes all we care about is the answer. But more often we care about why someone knows the answer is this instead of that. The argument about what makes this answer right — or other answers wrong — should make it possible to tell why. And it often will help inform other problems. Being able to use the work done for one problem to solve others, or better, a whole family of problems, is fantastic. It’s the sort of thing mathematicians naturally try to do.
Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits for the 27th of October, 2017. I understand people who don’t find Zits a particularly strong comic. (My experience is it’s more loved by my parent’s cohort than by mine.) But I will say when Scott and Borgman go for visual metaphor the strip is easily ten times better. I think the cartoonists have some editorial-cartoon experience and they’ll sometimes put it to good use.
Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits for the 27th uses mathematics as the emblem of complicated stuff in need of study. It’s a good visual. I have to say Jeremy’s material seems unorganized to start with, though.
with very little prompting. If you do need prompting, it’s this: there are two expressions for how much area of the square with sides a-plus-b. One of these expressions uses only terms of a and b. The other expression uses terms of a, b, and c. If this doesn’t get a bit of a grin out of you, don’t worry. There’s, like, 2,037 other proofs we already know about. We might ask whether we need quite so many proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. It doesn’t seem to be under serious question most of the time. 
. That sum, it turns out, equals zero. It reflects this curious connection between exponentiation, complex-valued numbers, and the trigonometric functions. It’s a weird thing to know is true, and it’s highly regarded in certain nerd circles for that weirdness.
![The Odds. Guy checking his phone after his friend's been knocked down: 'There's tons of stuff about being struck by a bolt of lightning --- nothing about bolts of fabric.' [Title panel extra gag: 'Lucky for you it's soft and silky.']](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/rhymes-with-orange_hilary-price_16-november-2018.gif)
![Rubik's Headquarters. It's a three-by-three wireframe with tiny offices inside. Person looking in: 'My corner office ... gone! I hate when they do a management shuffle.' [ Title panel, Other person: 'Rumor has it they're going to an open-concept model.' ]](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/hilary-price_rhymes-with-orange_29-may-2018.gif)
. This is some mathematics about black holes, legitimate and interesting. It is the entropy of a black hole. The dazzling thing about this is all but one of those symbols on the right is the same for every black hole. ‘c’ is the speed of light, as in ‘E = mc2‘. G is the gravitational constant of the universe, a measure of how strong gravity is. 
is Planck’s constant, a kind of measure of how big quantum mechanics effects are. ‘k’ is the Boltzmann constant, which normal people never heard of but that everyone in physics and chemistry knows well. It’s what you multiply by to switch from the temperature of a thing to the thermal energy of the thing, or divide by to go the other way. It’s the same number for everything in the universe. 
![Patron of the Halloween Costume Advice booth: 'I want to be a zombie!' Regular character whose name I can't remember and can't find: 'That's a tough one ... we have to find a way to get you into character. Here [ handing a textbook over ] --- sit through one of Miss Barnes's math classes.'](https://nebusresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/steve-kelley-jeff-parker_dustin_25-october-2017.gif)
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