Reading the Comics, May 7, 2020: Getting to Golf Edition

Last week saw a modest number of mathematically-themed comic strips. Then it threw in a bunch of them all on Thursday. I’m splitting the week partway through that, since it gives me some theme to this collection.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 3rd of May is a dictionary joke, with Brewster naming each kind of chart and making a quick joke about it. The comic may help people who’ve had trouble remembering the names of different kinds of graphs. I doubt people are likely to confuse a pie chart with a bar chart, admittedly. But I could imagine thinking a ‘line graph’ is what we call a bar chart, especially if the bars are laid out horizontally as in the second panel here.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit for the 3rd of May, 2020. It’s been surprisingly long since I last reviewed this strip here. Essays featuring Brewster Rockit are at this link.

The point of all these graphs is to understand data geometrically. We have fair intuitions about relatives lengths and areas. Bar charts represent relative magnitudes in lengths. Pie charts and bubble charts represent magnitudes in area. We have okay skills in noticing structures in complex shapes. Line graphs and scatter plots use that skill. So these pictures can help us understand some abstraction or something we can’t sense using a sense we do have. It’s not necessarily great; note that I said our intuitions were ‘fair’ and ‘okay’. But we hope to use reason helped by intuition to better understand what we are doing.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 3rd is a resisting-the-story-problem joke. It’s built not just on wondering the point of story problems at all, but of these story problems during the pandemic. (Which Mallett on the 27th of April, would be taking “some liberties” with the real world. It’s a respectable decision.)

And, yes, in the greater scheme of things, any homework or classwork problem is trivial. It’s meant to teach how to calculate things we would like to know. The framing of the story is meant to give us a reason to want to know a thing. But they are practice, and meant to be practice. One practices on something of no consequence, where errors in one’s technique can be corrected without breaking anything.

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 3rd of May, 2020. Reading the Comics essays with some mention of something in Frazz are gathered at this link.

It happens a round of story problems broke out among my family. My sister’s house has some very large trees. There turns out to be a poorly-organized process for estimating the age of these trees from their circumference. This past week saw a lot of chatter and disagreement about what the ages of these trees might be.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 4th riffs on the difference between rectangles and trapezoids. It’s also a repeat, featured here just five years ago. Amazing how time slips on like that.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 4th is another counting-sheep joke. It features one of those shorthands for large numbers which often makes them more manageable.

Michael Fry’s Committed rerun for the 7th finally gets us to golf. The Lazy Parent tries to pass off watching golf as educational, with working out the distance to the pin as a story problem. Structurally this is just fine, though: a golfer would be interested to know how far the ball has yet to go. All the information needed is given. It’s the question of whether anyone but syndicated cartoonists cares about golf that’s a mystery.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 7th is another golf and mathematics joke. Jason has taken the homonym of ‘fore’ for ‘four’, and then represented ‘four’ in a needlessly complicated way. Amend does understand how nerd minds work. The strip originally ran the 21st of May, 1998.

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That’s enough comics for me for today. I should have the rest of last week’s in a post at this link soon. Thank you.

Reading the Comics, September 21, 2019: Filling Out The Week, Part 1 Edition

There were a couple more comic strips than made a good fit in yesterday’s recap. Here’s the two that I had much to write about.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 18th is another rerun. I mentioned it back in December of 2016. Zeno’s Paradoxical Pasta plays on the most famous of Zeno’s Paradoxes, about how to get to a place one has to get halfway there, but to get halfway there requires getting halfway to halfway. This goes on in infinite regression. The paradox is not a failure to understand that we can get to a place, or finish swallowing a noodle.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby rerun for the 18th of September, 2019. This is another strip I’m gathering has lapsed into perpetual reruns, so might drop it. But essays featuring Robbie and Bobby should be at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 21st gets that strip back to my attention after, like, days out of it. It’s a logic joke, as promised, and that’s mathematics enough for me. Of course the risk of dying from a lightning strike has to be even lower than the risk of being struck by lightning.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 21st of September, 2019. I too am surprised it’s been almost a month since an essay with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, as gathered at this link. But then Andertoons went missing for like four months in 2018. All sorts of things will happen and we’re not ready for any of them.

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And then there were comic strips that are just of too slight mathematical content for me to go into at length. Several of them all ran on the same day, the 15th of September. Let me give you them.

Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends has a couple senior citizens remembering mathematics lessons from their youth. And getting oddly smug about doing it without calculators.

Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac reruns a mention of infinite monkey authorship. Always fun, to my way of thinking.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse was the Roman Numerals joke for the week.

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And that’s enough for just now. I expect to finish off the casual mentions with a Wednesday Reading the Comics post. The A to Z series should have ‘G’ tomorrow. And I’m still open for suggestions for the letters I through N. Thank you for reading.

Reading the Comics, September 12, 2019: This Threatens To Mess Up My Plan Edition

There were a healthy number of comic strips with at least a bit of mathematical content the past week. Enough that I would maybe be able to split them across three essays in all. This conflicts with my plans to post two A-To-Z essays, and two short pieces bringing archived things back to some attention, when you consider the other thing I need to post this week. Well, I’ll work out something, this week at least. But if Comic Strip Master Command ever sends me a really busy week I’m going to be in trouble.

Bud Blake’s Tiger rerun for the 7th has Punkinhead ask one of those questions so basic it ends up being good and deep. What is arithmetic, exactly? Other than that it’s the mathematics you learn in elementary school that isn’t geometry? — an answer that’s maybe not satisfying but at least has historical roots. The quadrivium, four of the seven liberal arts of old, were arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Each of these has a fair claim on being a mathematics study, though I’d agree that music is a small part of mathematics these days. (I first wrote a “minor” piece, and didn’t want people to think I was making a pun, but you’ll notice I’m sharing it anyway.) I can’t say what people who study music learn about mathematics these days. Still, I’m not sure I can give a punchy answer to the question.

Bud Blake’s Tiger for the 7th of September, 2019. Essays built on something mentioned in Tiger should appear at this link.

Mathworld offers the not-quite-precise definition that arithmetic is the field of mathematics dealing with integers or, more generally, numerical computation. But then it also offers a mnemonic for the spelling of arithmetic, which I wouldn’t have put in the fourth sentence of an article on the subject. I’m also not confident in that limitation to integers. Arithmetic certainly is about things we do on the integers, like addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, powers, roots, and factoring. So, yes, adding five and two is certainly arithmetic. But would we say that adding one-fifth and two is not arithmetic? Most other definitions I find allow that it can be about the rational numbers, or the real numbers. Some even accept the complex-valued numbers. The core is addition and subtraction, multiplication and division.

Arithmetic blends almost seamlessly into more complicated fields. One is number theory, which is the posing of problems that anyone can understand and that nobody can solve. If you ever run across a mathematical conjecture that’s over 200 years old and that nobody’s made much progress on besides checking that it’s true for all the whole numbers below 2^{1,000,000,000} – 1, it’s probably number theory. Another is group theory, in which we think about structures that look like arithmetic without necessarily having all its fancy features like, oh, multiplication or the ability to factor elements. And it weaves into computing. Most computers rely on some kind of floating-point arithmetic, which approximates a wide range of the rational numbers that we’d expect to actually need.

So arithmetic is one of those things so fundamental and universal that it’s hard to take a chunk and say that this is it.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 8th of September, 2019. Essays with some mention of Maria’s Day should be gathered at this link.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 8th has Maria fretting over what division means for emotions. I was getting ready to worry about Maria having the idea division means getting less of something. Five divided by one-half is not less than either five or one-half. My understanding is this unsettles a great many people learning division. But she does explicitly say, divide two, which I’m reading as “divide by two”. (I mean to be charitable in my reading of comic strips. It’s only fair.)

Still, even division into two things does not necessarily make things less. One of the fascinating and baffling discoveries of the 20th century was the Banach-Tarski Paradox. It’s a paradox only in that it defies intuition. According to it, one ball can be divided into as few as five pieces, and the pieces reassembled to make two whole balls. I would not expect Maria’s Dad to understand this well enough to explain.

Bob Weber Jr’s Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids for the 9th of September, 2019. I would have sworn there were more essays mentioning Slylock Fox than this, but here’s the whole set of tagged pieces. I guess they’re not doing as many logic puzzles and arithmetic games as I would have guessed.

Bob Weber Jr’s Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids for the 9th presents a logic puzzle. If you know the laws of Boolean algebra it’s a straightforward puzzle. But it’s light enough to understand just from ordinary English reading, too.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 12th of September, 2019. Essays mentioning something inspired by One Big Happy are at this link.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 12th is a little joke about finding mathematics problems in everyday life. Or it’s about the different ways one can represent numbers.

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There were naturally comic strips with too marginal a mention of mathematics to rate paragraphs. Among them the past week were these.

Stephen Bentley’s Herb and Jamaal rerun for the 11th portrays the aftermath of realizing a mathematics problem is easier than it seemed. Realizing this after a lot of work should feel good, as discovering a clever way around tedious work is great. But the lost time can still hurt.

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy Classics for the 11th, rerunning a strip from the 6th of December, 1949, has Sluggo trying to cheat in arithmetic.

Eric the Circle for the 13th, by “Naratex”, is the Venn Diagram joke for the week.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 13th is a joke about randomness, and the old phrase about doing random acts of kindness.

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And that’s where I’ll pause a while. Tuesday I hope to publish another in the Fall 2019 A To Z series, and Thursday the piece after that. I plan to have the other Reading the Comics post for the past week published here on Wednesday. The great thing about having plans is that without them, nothing can go wrong.

Reading the Comics, July 2, 2019: Back On Schedule Edition

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.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange for the 30th of June, 2019. Essays with some mention of Rhymes With Orange should be at this link.

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.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 1st is a rerun. I discussed it last time it appeared, in November 2016, which was before I would routinely include the strips under discussion. The strip’s built on wordplay, using the word ‘power’ in its connotations for might and for exponents.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby rerun for the 1st of July, 2019. I think but am not sure that this comic strip has lapsed into eternal reruns. In any case the essays that mention some topic raised by Robbie and Bobby are at this link.

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.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 2nd of July, 2019. This one doesn’t appear in every Reading the Comics essay, so you can find my discussions inspired by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal at this link.

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.

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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.

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Whether or not I have something for Thursday, by Sunday I should have anotherReading the Comics post. It, as well as my back catalogue of these essays, should be at this link. Thanks for worrying about me.

Reading the Comics, April 5, 2019: The Slow Week Edition

People reading my Reading the Comics post Sunday maybe noticed something. I mean besides my correct, reasonable complaining about the Comics Kingdom redesign. That is that all the comics were from before the 30th of March. That is, none were from the week before the 7th of April. The last full week of March had a lot of comic strips. The first week of April didn’t. So things got bumped a little. Here’s the results. It wasn’t a busy week, not when I filter out the strips that don’t offer much to write about. So now I’m stuck for what to post Thursday.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 3rd is a Library of Babel comic strip. This is mathematical enough for me. Jorge Luis Borges’s Library is a magnificent representation of some ideas about infinity and probability. I’m surprised to realize I haven’t written an essay specifically about it. I have touched on it, in writing about normal numbers, and about the infinite monkey theorem.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 3rd of April, 2019. I would have sworn that I write more about this strip. But this seems to be the first time I’ve mentioned it since 2017. Well, that and other Robbie and Bobby-based essays are at this link.

The strip explains things well enough. The Library holds every book that will ever be written. In the original story there are some constraints. Particularly, all the books are 410 pages. If you wanted, say, a 600-page book, though, you could find one book with the first 410 pages and another book with the remaining 190 pages and then some filler. The catch, as explained in the story and in the comic strip, is finding them. And there is the problem of finding a ‘correct’ text. Every possible text of the correct length should be in there. So every possible book that might be titled Mark Twain vs Frankenstein, including ones that include neither Mark Twain nor Frankenstein, is there. Which is the one you want to read?

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 4th of April, 2019. Now this strip I’ve written about as recently as October. That appearance, and other Archie strips, are discussed at this link.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie for the 4th features an equal-divisions problem. In principle, it’s easy to divide a pizza (or anything else) equally; that’s what we have fractions for. Making them practical is a bit harder. I do like Jughead’s quick work, though. It’s got the slight-of-hand you expect from stage magic.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 4th of April, 2019. And this strip I’ve written about … wait, can I really have gone since early March without mentioning? Huh. Well, so it appears. Essays discussing The Argyle Sweater appear at this link.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 4th takes place in an algebra class. I’m not sure what algebraic principle demonstrates, but it probably came from somewhere. It’s 4,829,210. The exponentials on the blackboard do cue the reader to the real joke, of the sign reading “kick¹⁰ me”. I question whether this is really an exponential kicking situation. It seems more like a simple multiplication to me. But it would be harder to make that joke read clearly.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 5th is part of a sequence investigating how magnets work. Agnes and Trout find just … magnet parts inside. This is fair. It’s even mathematics.

Tony Cochran’s Agnes for the 5th of April, 2019. And this strip I quite like, but don’t get to discuss enough. My essays featuring Agnes appears at this link.

Thermodynamics classes teach one of the great mathematical physics models. This is about what makes magnets. Magnets are made of … smaller magnets. This seems like question-begging. Ultimately you get down to individual molecules, each of which is very slightly magnetic. When small magnets are lined up in the right way, they can become a strong magnet. When they’re lined up in another way, they can be a weak magnet. Or no magnet at all.

How do they line up? It depends on things, including how the big magnet is made, and how it’s treated. A bit of energy can free molecules to line up, making a stronger magnet out of a weak one. Or it can break up the alignments, turning a strong magnet into a weak one. I’ve had physics instructors explain that you could, in principle, take an iron rod and magnetize it just by hitting it hard enough on the desk. And then demagnetize it by hitting it again. I have never seen one do this, though.

This is more than just a physics model. The mathematics of it is … well, it can be easy enough. A one-dimensional, nearest-neighbor model, lets us describe how materials might turn into magnets or break apart, depending on their temperature. Two- or three-dimensional models, or models that have each small magnet affected by distant neighbors, are harder.

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And then there’s the comic strips that didn’t offer much to write about.
Brian Basset’s Red and Rover for the 3rd,
Liniers’s Macanudo for the 5th, Stephen Bentley’s Herb and Jamaal rerun for the 5th, and Gordon Bess’s Redeye rerun for the 5th all idly mention mathematics class, or things brought up in class.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 2nd is another more-than-100-percent strip. Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 3rd is a reprint of his Christmas Tree guide including a fir that “no longer inhabits Euclidean space”.

Mike Baldwin’s Cornered for the 31st depicts a common idiom about numbers. Eric the Circle for the 5th, by Rafoliveira, plays on the ∞ symbol.

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And that covers the mathematically-themed comic strips from last week. There are more coming, though. I’ll show them on Sunday. Thanks for reading.

Reading the Comics, October 2017: Mathematics Anxiety Edition

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.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby for the 26th is an anthropomorphic geometry joke. And it’s a shape joke I don’t remember seeing, at least not under my Reading the Comics line of jokes. (Maybe I’ve just forgotten). Also, trapezoids: my most popular post of all time ever, even though it’s only got a couple months’ lead on the other perennial favorite, about how many grooves are on a record’s side.

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.