Reading the Comics, June 20, 2019: Old Friends Edition

We continue to be in the summer vacation doldrums for mathematically-themed comic strips. But there’ve been a couple coming out. I could break this week’s crop into two essays, for example. All of today’s strips are comics that turn up in my essays a lot. It’s like hanging out with a couple of old friends.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 17th uses the motif of arithmetic expressions as “difficult” things. The expressions Samson quotes seem difficult for being syntactically weird: What does the colon under the radical sign mean in ? Or they’re difficult for being indirect, using a phrase like “50%” for “half”. But with some charity we can read this as Horace talking about 3:33 am to about 6:30 am. I agree that those are difficult hours.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 17th of June, 2019. Some of the many essays inspired by Dark Side of the Horse are at this link.

It also puts me in mind of a gift from a few years back. An aunt sent me an Irrational Watch, with a dial that didn’t have the usual counting numbers on it. Instead there were various irrational numbers, like the Golden Ratio or the square root of 50 or the like. Also the Euler-Mascheroni Constant, a number that may or may not be irrational. Nobody knows. It’s likely that it is irrational, but it’s not proven. It’s a good bit of fun, although it does make it a bit harder to use the watch for problems like “how long is it until 4:15?” This isn’t quite what’s going on here — the square root of nine is a noticeably rational number — but it seems in that same spirit.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 18th sees Wavehead react to the terminology of the “improper fraction”. “Proper” and “improper” as words carry a suggestion of … well, decency. Like there’s something faintly immoral about having an improper fraction. “Proper” and “improper”, as words, attach to many mathematical concepts. Several years ago I wrote that “proper” amounted to “it isn’t boring”. This is a fair way to characterize, like, proper subsets or proper factors or the like. It’s less obvious that is a boring fraction.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 18th of June, 2019. Essays with some mention of a topic from Andertoons are at this link.

I may need to rewrite that old essay. An “improper” form satisfies all the required conditions for the term. But it misses some of the connotation of the term. It’s true that, say, the new process takes “a fraction of the time” of the old, if the old process took one hour and the new process takes fourteen years. But if you tried telling someone that they would assume you misunderstood something. The ordinary English usage of “fraction” carries the connotation of “a fraction between zero and one”, and that’s what makes a “proper fraction”.

In practical terms, improper fractions are fine. I don’t know of any mathematicians who seriously object to them, or avoid using them. The hedging word “seriously” is in there because of a special need. That need is: how big is, say, ? Is it bigger than five? Is it smaller than six? An improper fraction depends on you knowing, in this case, your fourteen-times tables to tell. Switching that to a mixed fraction, , helps figure out what the number means. That’s as far as we have to worry about the propriety of fractions.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 20th uses the form of a Fermi problem for its joke. Fermi problems have a place in mathematical modeling. The idea is to find an estimate for some quantity. We often want to do this. The trick is to build a simple model, and to calculate using a tiny bit of data. The Fermi problem that has someone reached public consciousness is called the Fermi paradox. The question that paradox addresses is, how many technologically advanced species are there in the galaxy? There’s no way to guess. But we can make models and those give us topics to investigate to better understand the problem. (The paradox is that reasonable guesses about the model suggest there should be so many aliens that they’d be a menace to air traffic. Or that the universe should be empty except for us. Both alternatives seem unrealistic.) Such estimates can be quite wrong, of course. I remember a Robert Heinlein essay in which he explained the Soviets were lying about the size of Moscow, his evidence being he didn’t see the ship traffic he expected when he toured the city. I do not remember that he analyzed what he might have reasoned wrong when he republished this in a collection of essays he didn’t seem to realize were funny.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 20th of June, 2019. Anyone who’s been reading these for a couple weeks knows, but, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal features in essays at this link. Hey, every essay is somebody’s first.

So the interview question presented is such a Fermi problem. The job applicant, presumably, has not committed to memory the number of employees at the company. But there would be clues. Does the company own the whole building it’s in, or just a floor? Just an office? How large is the building? How large is the parking lot? Are there people walking the hallways? How many desks are in the offices? The question could be answerable. The applicant has a pretty good chain of reasoning too.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 20th has several mathematical jokes in it. One is the use of excessively many decimal points to indicate intelligence. Grant that someone cares about the hyperbolic cosines of 15.2. There is no need to cite its wrong value to nine digits past the decimal. Decimal points are hypnotic, though, and listing many of them has connotations of relentless, robotic intelligence. That is what Amend went for in the characters here. That and showing how terrible nerds are when they find some petty issue to rage over.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 20th of June, 2019. It originally ran the 3rd of July, 1997. Essays based on FoxTrot, either the current-run Sundays, newspaper-rerun 2000s strips, or 90s-run Classics, are at this link.

Eugene is correct about the hyperbolic cosine being wrong, there, though. He’s not wrong to check that. It’s good form to have some idea what a plausible answer should be. It lets one spot errors, for one. No mathematician is too good to avoid making dumb little mistakes. And computing tools will make mistakes too. Fortunately they don’t often, but this strip originally ran a couple years after the discovery of the Pentium FDIV bug. This was a glitch in the way certain Pentium chips handled floating-point division. It was discovered by Dr Thomas Nicely, at Lynchberg College, who found inconsistencies in some calculations when he added Pentium systems to the computers he was using. This Pentium bug may have been on Amend’s mind.

Eugene would have spotted right away that the hyperbolic cosine was wrong, though, and didn’t need nine digits for it. The hyperbolic cosine is a function. Its domain is the real numbers. It range is entirely numbers greater than or equal to one, or less than or equal to minus one. A 0.9 something just can’t happen, not as the hyperbolic cosine for a real number.

And what is the hyperbolic cosine? It’s one of the hyperbolic trigonometric functions. The other trig functions — sine, tangent, arc-sine, and all that — have their shadows too. You’ll see the hyperbolic sine and hyperbolic tangent some. You will never see the hyperbolic arc-cosecant and anyone trying to tell you that you need it is putting you on. They turn up in introductory calculus classes because you can differentiate them, and integrate them, the way you can ordinary trig functions. They look just different enough from regular trig functions to seem interesting for half a class. By the time you’re doing this, your instructor needs that.

The ordinary trig functions come from the unit circle. You can relate the Cartesian coordinates of a point on the circle described by to the angle made between that point and the center of the circle and the positive x-axis. Hyperbolic trig functions we can relate the Cartesian coordinates of a point on the hyperbola described by to angles instead. The functions … don’t have a lot of use at the intro-to-calculus level. Again, other than that they let you do some quite testable differentiation and integration problems that don’t look exactly like regular trig functions do. They turn up again if you get far enough into mathematical physics. The hyperbolic cosine does well in describing catenaries, that is, the shape of flexible wires under gravity. And the family of functions turn up in statistical mechanics, often, in the mathematics of heat and of magnetism. But overall, these functions aren’t needed a lot. A good scientific calculator will offer them, certainly. But it’ll be harder to get them.

There is another oddity at work here. The cosine of 15.2 degrees is about 0.965, yes. But mathematicians will usually think of trigonometric functions — regular or hyperbolic — in terms of radians. This is just a different measure of angles. A right angle, 90 degrees, is measured as radians. The use of radians makes a good bit of other work easier. Mathematicians get to accustomed to using radians that to use degrees seems slightly alien. The cosine of 15.2 radians, then, would be about -0.874. Eugene has apparently left his calculator in degree mode, rather than radian mode. If he weren’t so worked up about the hyperbolic cosine being wrong he might have noticed. Perhaps that will be another exciting error to discover down the line.

This strip was part of a several-months-long story Bill Amend did, in which Jason has adventures at Math Camp. I don’t remember the whole story. But I do expect the strip to have several more appearances here this summer.

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And that’s about half of last week’s comics. A fresh Reading the Comics post should be at this link later this week. Thank you for reading along.

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Reading the Comics, May 30, 2019: Catching Out Tiger Mode

So this has been a week full of plans and machinations. But along the way, I made a discovery about Tiger. Curious? Of course you are. Who would not be? Read on and learn what my discovery is.

Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 26th has Gracie counting by mathematical expressions. This kind of thing can be fun, at least for someone who enjoys doing arithmetic. Several years ago someone gave me a calendar in which every day was designated by an expression. As a mental exercise it wasn’t much, to my tastes. If you know that this is the second of the month, it’s no great work to figure out what should be. But there is the fun in coming up with different ways to express a number. And here let me mention an old piece about how Paul Dirac worked out an expression for every counting number, using exactly four 2’s.

Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 26th of May, 2019. It’s been a while since I’ve had reason to discuss this strip, but Baldo-inspired essays should be at this link.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not for the 26th mentions several fairly believable things. The relevant part is about naming the kind of surface that a Pringles chip represents. That is, the surface a Pringles chip would be if it weren’t all choppy and irregular, and if it continued indefinitely.

The shape is, as Graziano’s Ripley’s claims, a hypberbolic paraboloid. It’s a shape you get to know real well if you’re a mathematics major. They turn up in multivariable calculus and, if you do mathematical physics, in dynamical systems. It’s also a shape mathematics majors get to calling a “saddle shape”, because it looks enough like a saddle if you’re not really into horses.

The shape is one of the “quadratic surfaces”. These are shapes which can be described as the sets of Cartesian coordinates that make a quadratic equation true. Equations in Cartesian coordinates will have independent variables x, y, and z, unless there’s a really good reason. A quadratic equation will be the sum of some constant times x, and some constant times x², and some constant times y, and some constant times y², and some constant times z, and some constant times z². Also some constant times xy, and some constant times yz, and some constant times xz. No xyz, though. And it might have some constant added to the mix at the end of all this.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not for the 26th of May, 2019. The collection of mathematics trivia I’ve noticed in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not should be at this link.

There are seventeen different kinds of quadratic surfaces. Some of them are familiar, like ellipsoids or cones. Some hardly seem like they could be called “quadratic”, like intersecting planes. Or parallel planes. Some look like mid-century modern office lobby decor, like elliptic cylinders. And some have nice, faintly science-fictional shapes, like hyperboloids or, as in here, hyperbolic paraboloids. I’m not a judge of which ones would be good snack shapes.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 26th of May, 2019. And I’m glad Horace has finally returned to these pages. Dark Side of the Horse gets discussed in essays at this link.

Samson’s Dark Side of the Horse for the 26th is a funny-answer-to-a-story-problem joke. I had thought these had all switched over to apples, rather than candy bars. But that would make the punch line less believable.

Bud Blake’s Tiger for the 31st is a rerun, of course. Blake died in 2005 and no one else drew his comic strip. It’s a funny-answer-to-a-story-problem joke. And, more, it’s a repeat of a Tiger strip I’ve already run here. I admit a weird pride when I notice a comic strip doing a repeat. It gives me some hope that I might still be able to remember things. But this is also a special Tiger repeat. It’s the strip which made me notice Bud Blake redrawing comics he had already used. This one is not a third iteration of the strip which reran in April 2015 and June 2016. It’s a straight repeat of the June 2016 strip.

Bud Blake’s Tiger for the 31st of May, 2019. Appearances made by Tiger in these essays are at this link. Yes, I have to think about whether I mean to retire this link. But don’t worry: I’ll forget to act on that need.

The mystery to me now is why King Features apparently has less than three years’ worth of reruns in the bank for Tiger. The comic ran from 1965 to 2003, and it’s not as though the strip made pop culture references or jokes ripped from the headlines. Even if the strip changed its dimensions over the decades, to accommodate shrinking newspapers, there should be a decade at least of usable strips to rerun.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 31st of May, 2019. And as the Andertoons of multi-panel strips, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal features in the many essays at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 31st uses a chart to tease mathematicians, both in the comic and in the readership. The joke is in the format of the graph. The graph is supposed to argue that the Mathematician’s pedantry is increasing with time, and it does do that. But it is customary in this sort of graph for the independent variable to be the horizontal axis and the dependent variable the vertical. So, if the claim is that the pedantry level rises as time goes on, yes, this is a … well, I want to say wrong way to arrange the axes. This is because the chart, as drawn, breaks a convention. But convention is a tool to help people’s comprehension. We are right to ignore convention if doing so makes the chart better serve its purpose. Which, the punch line is, this does.

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There’s just enough comics for me to do another essay this coming week. That next Reading the Comics post should be at this link around Thursday. That would be Tuesday except I need to fit my monthly readership report in sometime, don’t I? I think I need to, anyway.

Reading the Comics, May 25, 2019: Slighter Comics Edition.

It turned out to be Thursday. These things happen. The comics for the second half of last week were more marginal

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 20th is a joke about holographic cosmology, proving that there are such things as jokes about holographic cosmology. Cosmology is about the big picture stuff, like, why there is a universe and why it looks like that. It’s a rather mathematical field, owing to the difficulty of doing controlled experiments. Holograms are that same technology used back in the 80s to put shoddy three-dimensional-ish pictures of eagles on credit cards. (In the United States. I imagine they were other animals in other countries.) Holograms, at least when they’re well-made, encode the information needed to make a three-dimensional image in a two-dimensional surface. (Please pretend that anything made of matter is two-dimensional like that.)

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 20th of May, 2019. Always glad to discuss Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, as you can see from these essays.

Holographic cosmology is a mathematical model for the universe. It represents the things in a space with a description of information on the boundary of this space. This seems bizarre and it won’t surprise you that key inspiration was in the strange physics of black holes. Properties of everything which falls into a black hole manifest in the event horizon, the boundary between normal space and whatever’s going on inside the black hole. The black hole is this three-dimensional volume, but in some way everything there is to say about it is the two-dimensional edge.

Dr Leonard Susskind did much to give this precise mathematical form. You didn’t think the character name was just a bit of whimsy, did you? Susskind’s work showed how the information of a particle falling into a black hole — information here meaning stuff like its position and momentum — turn into oscillations in the event horizon. The holographic principle argues this can be extended to ordinary space, the whole of the regular universe. Is this so? It’s hard to say. It’s a corner of string theory. It’s difficult to run experiments that prove very much. And we are stuck with an epistemological problem. If all the things in the universe and their interactions are equally well described as a three-dimensional volume or as a two-dimensional surface, which is “real”? It may seem intuitively obvious that we experience a three-dimensional space. But that intuition is a way we organize our understanding of our experiences. That’s not the same thing as truth.

Gene Weingarten, Dan Weingarten, and David Clark’s Barney and Clyde for the 22nd of May, 2019. Essays which mention some aspect of Barney and Clyde should appear at this link.

Gene Weingarten, Dan Weingarten, and David Clark’s Barney and Clyde for the 22nd is a joke about power, and how it can coerce someone out of truth. Arithmetic serves as an example of indisputable truth. It could be any deductive logic statement, or for that matter a definition. Arithmetic is great for the comic purpose needed here, though. Anyone can understand, at least the simpler statements, and work out their truth or falsity. And need very little word balloon space for it.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 25th of May, 2019. My attempts to form a quite rational and faintly linear discussion out of Zippy the Pinhead should be gathered here.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 25th also features a quick mention of algebra as the height of rationality. Also as something difficult to understand. Most fields are hard to understand, when you truly try. But algebra works well for this writing purpose. Anyone who’d read Zippy the Pinhead has an idea of what understanding algebra would be like, the way they might not have an idea of holographic cosmology.

Teresa Logan’s Laughing Redhead Comics for the 25th of May, 2019. This one is a new tag. So there’s just the one Laughing Redhead Comics essay at this link. But that might change any day now!

Teresa Logan’s Laughing Redhead Comics for the 25th is the Venn diagram joke for the week, this one with a celebrity theme. Your choice whether the logic of the joke makes sense. Ryan Reynolds and John Krasinski are among those celebrities that I keep thinking I don’t know, but that it turns out I do know. Ryan Gosling I’m still not sure about.

And then there are a couple strips too slight even to appear in this collection. Dean Young and John Marshall’s Blondie on the 22nd did a lottery joke, with discussion of probability along the way. (And I hadn’t had a tag for ‘Blondie’ before, so that’s an addition which someday will baffle me.) Bob Shannon’s Tough Town for the 23rd mentions mathematics teaching. It’s in service of a pun.

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And now I’ve had the past week covered. The next Reading the Comics post should be at this link come Sunday.

Reading the Comics, April 26, 2019: Absurd Equation Edition

And now I’ll cover the handful of comic strips which ran last week and which didn’t fit in my Sunday report. And link to a couple of comics that ultimately weren’t worth discussion in their own right, mostly because they were repeats of ones I’ve already discussed. I have been trimming rerun comics out of my daily reading. But there are ones I like too much to give up, at least not right now.

Bud Blake’s Tiger for the 25th has Tiger quizzing Punkinhead on counting. The younger kid hasn’t reached the point where he can work out numbers without a specific physical representation. It would come, if he were in one of those comics where people age.

Bud Blake’s Tiger for the 25th of April, 2019. Essays that bring up something in Tiger appear at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 24th is an optimization problem, and an expectation value problem. The wisdom-seeker searches for the most satisfying life. The mathematician-guru offers an answer based in probability and expectation values. List all the possible outcomes, and how probable each are, and how much of the relevant quantity you get (or lose) with each outcome. This is a quite utilitarian view of life-planning. Finding the best possible outcome, given certain constraints, is another big field of mathematics.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 24th of April, 2019. There’s plenty of discussion of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal at this link.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 26th is a nonsense-equation panel. It’s built on a cute idea. If you do wan to know how many bears you can fit in the kitchen you would need something like this. Not this, though. You can tell by the dimensions. ‘x’, as the area of the kitchen, has units of, well, area. Square feet, or square meters, or square centimeters, or whatever is convenient to measure its area. The average volume of a bear, meanwhile, has units of … volume. Cubic feet, or cubic meters, or cubic centimeters, or the like. The one divided by the other has units of one-over-distance.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 26th of April, 2019. Other essays featuring by Wrong Hands are at this link.

And I don’t know what the units of desire to have bears in your kitchen are, but I’m guessing it’s not “bear-feet”, although that would be worth a giggle. The equation would parse more closely if y were the number of bears that can fit in a square foot, or something similar. I say all this just to spoil Atkinson’s fine enough bit of nonsense.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy rerun for the 26th of April, 2019. It first ran the 3rd of December, 1931. This and other mentions of Crosby’s brilliant Skippy should appear at this link.

Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 26th is a joke built on inappropriate extrapolation. 3520 seconds is a touch under an hour. Skippy’s pace, if he could keep it up, would be running a mile every five minutes, 52 seconds. That pace isn’t impossible — I find it listed on charts for marathon runners. But that would be for people who’ve trained to be marathon or other long-distance runners. They probably have different fifty-yard run times.

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And now for some of the recent comics that didn’t seem worth their own discussion, and why they didn’t.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 20th features reciting the digits of π as a pointless macho stunt. There are people who make a deal of memorizing digits of π. Everyone needs hobbies, and memorizing meaningless stuff is a traditional fanboy’s way of burying oneself in the thing appreciated. Me, I can give you π to … I want to say sixteen digits. I might have gone farther in my youth, but I was heartbroken when I learned one of the digits I had memorized I got wrong, and so after correcting that mess I gave up going farther.

Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy rerun for the 22nd has Ruthie seeking mathematics help from the homework hotline. The mathematics is just a pretext. And Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 22nd is the color version of that comic with the Platonic Fir tree, discussed several times. Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff for the 25th reprints the pre-relettering version of >the eating-the-roast-beef joke This is the strip that I’d found changed to “eating ham” in 2018, part of the strip’s mysterious and unexplained relettering.

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And now I am, briefly, caught up on the comic strips. I’ll be behind again by Sunday, though. I’ll do something about that, in an essay you should be able to find at this link.

Reading the Comics, April 18, 2019: Slow But Not Stopped Week Edition

The first, important, thing is that I have not disappeared or done something worse. I just had one of those weeks where enough was happening that something had to give. I could either write up stuff for my mathematics blog, or I could feel guilty about not writing stuff up for my mathematics blog. Since I didn’t have time to do both, I went with feeling guilty about not writing, instead. I’m hoping this week will give me more writing time, but I am fooling only myself.

Second is that Comics Kingdom has, for all my complaining, gotten less bad in the redesign. Mostly in that the whole comics page loads at once, now, instead of needing me to click to “load more comics” every six strips. Good. The strips still appear in weird random orders, especially strips like Prince Valiant that only run on Sundays, but still. I can take seeing a vintage Boner’s Ark Sunday strip six unnecessary times. The strips are still smaller than they used to be, and they’re not using the decent, three-row format that they used to. And the archives don’t let you look at a week’s worth in one page. But it’s less bad, and isn’t that all we can ever hope for out of the Internet anymore?

And finally, Comic Strip Master Command wanted to make this an easy week for me by not having a lot to write about. It got so light I’ve maybe overcompensated. I’m not sure I have enough to write about here, but, I don’t want to completely vanish either.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 15th of April, 2019. Appearances in these pages of Reality Check should be gathered at this link.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 15th is … hm. Well, it’s not an anthropomorphic-numerals joke. It is some kind of wordplay, making concrete a common phrase about, and attitude toward, numbers. I could make the fussy difference between numbers and numerals here but I’m not sure anyone has the patience for that.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 17th of April, 2019. I am surprised that this is the first time this strip has drawn a mention this month. Well, this and other Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal posts are at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 17th touches around mathematics without, I admit, necessarily saying anything specific. The angel(?) welcoming the man to heaven mentions creating new systems of mathematics as some fit job for the heavenly host. The discussion of creating self-consistent physics systems seems mathematical in nature too. I’m not sure whether saying one could “attempt” to create self-consistent physics is meant to imply that our universe’s physics are not self-consistent. To create a “maximally complex reality using the simplest possible constructions” seems like a mathematical challenge as well. There are important fields of mathematics built on optimizing, trying to create the most extreme of one thing subject to some constraints or other.

I think the strip’s premise is the old, partially a joke, concept that God is a mathematician. This would explain why the angel(?) seems to rate doing mathematics or mathematics-related projects as so important. But even then … well, consider. There’s nothing about designing new systems of mathematics that ordinary mortals can’t do. Creating new physics or new realities is beyond us, certainly, but designing the rules for such seems possible. I think I understood this comic better then I had thought about it less. Maybe including it in this column has only made trouble for me.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 17th of April, 2019. Essays inspired by something from Savage Chickens should be at this link.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 17th amuses me by making a strip out of a logic paradox. It’s not quite your “this statement is a lie” paradox, but it feels close to that, to me. To have the first chicken call it “Birthday Paradox” also teases a familiar probability problem. It’s not a true paradox. It merely surprises people who haven’t encountered the problem before. This would be the question of how many people you need to have in a group before there’s a 50 percent (75 percent, 99 percent, whatever you like) chance of at least one pair sharing a birthday.

And I notice on Wikipedia a neat variation of this birthday problem. This generalization considers splitting people into two distinct groups, and how many people you need in each group to have a set chance of a pair, one person from each group, sharing a birthday. Apparently both a 32-person group of 16 women and 16 men, or a 49-person group of 43 women and six men, have a 50% chance of some woman-man pair sharing a birthday. Neat.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 18th of April, 2019. And essays inspired by Off The Mark should appear at this link.

Mark Parisi’s Off The Mark for the 18th sports a bit of wordplay. It’s built on how multiplication and division also have meanings in biology. … If I’m not mis-reading my dictionary, “multiply” meant any increase in number first, and the arithmetic operation we now call multiplication afterwards. Division, similarly, meant to separate into parts before it meant the mathematical operation as well. So it might be fairer to say that multiplication and division are words that picked up mathematical meaning.

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And if you thought this week’s pickings had slender mathematical content? Jef Mallett’s Frazz, for the 19th, just mentioned mathematics homework. Well, there were a couple of quite slight jokes the previous week too, that I never mentioned. Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends for the 8th did a Roman numerals joke. The rerun of Richard Thompson’s Richard’s Poor Almanac for the 11th had the Platonic Fir Christmas tree, rendered as a geometric figure. I’ve discussed the connotations of that before.

And there we are. I hope to have some further writing this coming week. But if all else fails my next Reading the Comics essay, like all of them, should be at this link.

Reading the Comics, March 2, 2019: Process Edition

There were a handful of comic strips from last week which I didn’t already discuss. Two of them inspire me to write about how we know how to do things. That makes a good theme.

Marcus Hamilton and Scott Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace for the 27th gets into deep territory. How does we could count to a million? Maybe some determined soul has actually done it. But it would take the better part of a month. Things improve some if we allow that anything a computing machine can do, a person could do. This seems reasonable enough. It’s heady to imagine that all the computing done to support, say, a game of Roller Coaster Tycoon could be done by one person working alone with a sheet of paper. Anyway, a computer could show counting up to a million, a billion, a trillion, although then we start asking whether anyone’s checked that it hasn’t skipped some numbers. (Don’t laugh. The New York Times print edition includes an issue number, today at 58,258, at the top of the front page. It’s meant to list the number of published daily editions since the paper started. They mis-counted once, in 1898, and nobody noticed until 1999.)

Marcus Hamilton and Scott Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace for the 27th of February, 2019. I’m not quite confident that I have the credits right here, but if I am parsing Wikipedia’s entry correctly Hamilton and Ketcham work on the daily comics and Ron Ferdinand and Ketcham work on the Sunday strips. And I would have thought this was a new tag but it turns out I have several Dennis the Menace-based essays at this link.

Anyway, allow that. Nobody doubts that, if we put enough time and effort into it, we could count up to any positive whole number, or as they say in the trade, “counting number”. But … there is some largest number that we could possibly count to, even if we put every possible resource and all the time left in the universe to that counting. So how do we know we “could” count to a number bigger than that? What does it mean to say we “could” if the circumstances of the universe are such that we literally could not?

Counting up to a number seems uncontroversial enough. If I wanted to prove it I’d say something like “if we can count to the whole number with value N, then we can count to the whole number with value N + 1 by … going one higher.” And “We can count to the whole number 1”, proving that by enunciating as clearly as I can. The induction follows. Fine enough. That’s a nice little induction proof.

But … what if we needed to do more work? What if we needed to do a lot of work? There is a corner of logic which considers infinitely long proofs, or infinitely long statements. They’re not part of the usual deductive logic that any mathematician knows and relies on. We’re used to, at least in principle, being able to go through and check every step of a proof. If that becomes impossible is that still a proof? It’s not my field, so I feel comfortable not saying what’s right and what’s wrong. But it is one of those lectures in your Mathematical Logic course that leaves you hanging your jaw open.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th is a joke about algorithms. These are the processes by which we know how to do a thing. Here, Hansel and Gretel are shown using what’s termed a “greedy algorithm” to follow pebbles back home. This kind of thing reflects trying to find an acceptable solution, in this case, finding a path somewhere. What makes it “greedy” is each step. You’re at a pebble. You can see other pebbles nearby. Which one do you go to? Go to some extreme one; in this case, the nearest. It could instead have been the biggest, or the shiniest, the one at the greatest altitude, the one nearest a water source. Doesn’t matter. You choose your summum bonum and, at each step, take the move that maximizes that.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th of February, 2019. There’s no mistaking this for a new tag. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal inspires many discussions at this link.

The wicked mother knows something about this sort of algorithm, one that promises merely a solution and not the best solution. And that is that all these solutions can be broken. You can set up a problem that the algorithm can’t solve. Greedy algorithms are particularly vulnerable to this. They’re called “local maximums”. You find the best answer of the ones nearby, but not the best one you possibly could locate.

Why use an algorithm like this, that can be broken so? That’s because we often want to do problems like finding a path through the woods. There are so many possible paths that it’s hard to find one of the acceptable ones. But there are processes that will, typically, find an acceptable answer. Maybe processes that will let us take an acceptable answer and improve it to a good answer. And this is getting into my field.

Actual persons encountering one of these pebble rings would (probably) notice they were caught in a loop. And what they’d do, then, is suspend the greedy rule: instead of going to the nearest pebble they could find, they’d pick something else. Maybe simply the nearest pebble they hadn’t recently visited. Maybe the second-nearest pebble. Maybe they’d give up and strike out in a random direction, trusting they’ll find some more pebbles. This can lead them out of the local maximum they don’t want toward the “global maximum”, the path home, that they do. There’s no reason they can’t get trapped again — this is why the wicked mother made many loops — and no reason they might not get caught in a loop of loops again. Every algorithm like this can get broken by some problem, after all. But sometimes taking the not-the-best steps can lead you to a better solution. That’s the insight at the heart of “Metropolis-Hastings” algorithms, which was my field before I just read comic strips all the time.

Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 28th of February, 2019. This is another strip that’s inspired a host of essays. Brevity panels get shown off at this link.

Dan Thompson’s Brevity for the 28th is a nice simple anthropomorphic figures joke. It would’ve been a good match for the strips I talked about Sunday. I’m just normally reluctant to sort these comic strips other than by publication date.

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And there were some comic strips I didn’t think worth making paragraphs about. Chris Giarrusso’s G-Man Webcomics for the 25th of February mentioned negative numbers and built a joke on the … negative … connotations of that word. (And inaugurates a tag for that comic strip. This fact will certainly come back to baffle me some later day.) Art Sansom and Chip Sansom’s The Born Loser for the 2nd of March has a bad mathematics report card. Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 2nd has geometry be the subject parents don’t understand. Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classics for the 2nd has a mathematics-anxiety dream.

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And this closes out my mathematics comics for the week. Come Sunday I should have a fresh post with more comics, and I thank you for considering reading that.

Reading the Comics, January 30, 2019: Interlude Edition

I think there are just barely enough comic strips from the past week to make three essays this time around. But one of them has to be a short group, only three comics. That’ll be for the next essay when I can group together all the strips that ran in February. One strip that I considered but decided not to write at length about was Ed Allison’s dadaist Unstrange Phenomena for the 28th. It mentions Roman Numerals and the idea of sneaking message in through them. But that’s not really mathematics. I usually enjoy the particular flavor of nonsense which Unstrange Phenomena uses; you might, too.

John McPherson’s Close to Home for the 29th uses an arithmetic problem as shorthand for an accomplished education. The problem is solvable. Of course, you say. It’s an equation with quadratic polynomial; it can hardly not be solved. Yes, fine. But McPherson could easily have thrown together numbers that implied x was complex-valued, or had radicals or some other strange condition. This is one that someone could do in their heads, at least once they practiced in mental arithmetic.

John McPherson’s Close to Home for the 29th of January, 2019. Essays inspired by Close To Home should appear at this link.

I feel reasonably confident McPherson was just having a giggle at the idea of putting knowledge tests into inappropriate venues. So I’ll save the full rant. But there is a long history of racist and eugenicist ideology that tried to prove certain peoples to be mentally incompetent. Making an arithmetic quiz prerequisite to something unrelated echoes that. I’d have asked McPherson to rework the joke to avoid that.

(I’d also want to rework the composition, since the booth, the swinging arm, and the skirted attendant with the clipboard don’t look like any tollbooth I know. But I don’t have an idea how to redo the layout so it’s more realistic. And it’s not as if that sort of realism would heighten the joke.)

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 29th of January, 2019. Every Reading the Comics essay has a bit of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal in it. The essays with a particularly high Breakfast Cereal concentration appear at this link, though.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 29th riffs on the problem of squaring the circle. This is one of three classical problems of geometry. The lecturer describes it just fine: is it possible to make a square that’s got the same area as a given circle, using only straightedge and compass? There are shapes it’s easy to do this for, such as rectangles, parallelograms, triangles, and (why not?) this odd crescent-moon shaped figure called the lune. Circles defied all attempts. In the 19th century mathematicians found ways to represent the operations of classical geometry with algebra, and could use the tools of algebra to show squaring the circle was impossible. The squaring would be equivalent to finding a polynomial, with integer coefficients, that has as a root. And we know from the way algebra works that this can’t be done. So squaring the circle can’t be done.

The lecturer’s hack, modifying the compass and straightedge, lets you in principle do whatever you want. The hack isn’t new either. Modifying the geometric tools changes what you can and can’t do. The Ancient Greeks recognized that adding some specialized tools would make the problem possible. But that falls outside the scope of the problem.

Which feeds to the secondary joke, of making the philosophers sad. Often philosophy problems test one’s intuition about an idea by setting out a problem, often with unpleasant choices. A common problem with students that I’m going ahead and guessing are engineers is then attacking the setup of the question, trying to show that the problem couldn’t actually happen. You know, as though there were ever a time significant numbers of people were being tied to trolley tracks. (By the way, that thing about silent movie villains tying women to railroad tracks? Only happened in comedies spoofing Victorian melodramas. It’s always been a parody.) Attacking the logic of a problem may make for good movie drama. But it makes for a lousy student and a worse class discussion.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy for the 30th of January, 2019. It originally ran the 6th of December, 1979. I’m usually happy when I get the chance to talk about this strip. The art’s pretty sweet. When I do discuss Quincy the essays should appear at this link.

Ted Shearer’s Quincy rerun for the 30th uses a bit of mathematics and logic talk. It circles the difference between the feeling one can have about the rational meaning of a situation and how the situation feels to someone. It seems like a jump that Quincy goes from being asked about logic to talking about arithmetic. Possibly Quincy’s understanding of logic doesn’t start from the sort of very abstract concept that makes arithmetic hard to get to, though.

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There should be another Reading the Comics post this week. It should be here, when it appears. There should also be one on Sunday, as usual.

Reading the Comics, January 26, 2019: The Week Ended Early Edition

Last week started out at a good clip: two comics with enough of a mathematical theme I could imagine writing a paragraph about them each day. Then things puttered out. The rest of the week had almost nothing. At least nothing that seemed significant enough. I’ll list those, since that’s become my habit, at the end of the essay.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 20th is my first chance to show off the new artist and writer team. They’ve decided to make Sunday strips a side continuity about a young Alley Oop and his friends. I’m interested. The strip is built on the bit of pop anthropology that tells us “primitive” tribes will have very few counting words. That you can express concepts like one, two, and three, but then have to give up and count “many”.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 20th of January, 2019. I don’t seem to have had much cause to mention Alley Oop before; the only previous reference I can find is in this cameo in a different comic. Well, this and any other essays that write about Alley Oop at any length should be at this link. I don’t figure to differentiate between the weekday Alley Oop strip and the Sunday Little Oop line in using this tag.

Perhaps it’s so. Some societies have been found to have, what seem to us, rather few numerals. This doesn’t reflect on anyone’s abilities or intelligence or the like. And it doesn’t mean people who lack a word for, say, “forty-nine” would be unable to compute. It might take longer, but probably just from inexperience. If someone practiced much calculation on “forty-nine” they’d probably have a name for it. And folks raised in the western mathematics use, even enjoy, some vagueness about big numbers too. We might say there are “dozens” of a thing even if there are not precisely 24, 36, or 48 of the thing; “52” is close enough and we probably didn’t even count it up. “Hundred” similarly has gotten the connotation of being a precise number, but it’s used to mean “really quite a lot of a thing”. The words “thousands”, “millions”, and mock-numbers like “zillions” have a similar role. They suggest different ranges of what might be “many”.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 20th is a SABRmetrics joke! At least, it’s an optimization joke, built on the idea that you can find an optimum strategy for anything, whether winning baseball games or The War. The principle is hard to argue with. Nobody would doubt that different approaches to a battle affect how likely winning is. We can imagine gathering data on how different tactics affect the outcome. (We can easily imagine combat simulators running these experiments, particularly.)

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 20th of January, 2019. Pretty much every Reading the Comics brings up this strip. But the essays that specifically mention Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal should be at this link.

The catch — well, one catch — is that this tempts one to reward a process. Once it’s taken for granted the process works, then whether it’s actually doing what you want gets forgotten. And once everyone knows what’s being measured it becomes possible to game the system. Famously, in the mid-1960s the United States tried to judge its progress in the Vietname War by counting the number of enemy soldiers killed. There was then little reason to care about who was killed, or why. And reason to not care whether actual enemy soldiers were being killed. There’s good to be said about testing whether the things you try to do work. There’s great danger in thinking that the thing you can measure guarantees success.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 21st is a bit of fun with definitions. Mathematicians rely on definitions. It’s hard to imagine a proof about something undefined. But definitions are hard to compose. We usually construct a definition because we want a common term to describe a collection of things, and to exclude another collection of things. And we need people like Wavehead who can find edge cases, things that seem to satisfy a definition while breaking its spirit. This can let us find unstated assumptions that we should pay attention to. Or force us to accept that the definition is so generally useful that we’ll tolerate it having some counter-intuitive implications.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 21st of January, 2019. Pretty much every Reading the Comics brings up this strip, at least since last fall’s weird gap has ended. But the essays that specifically mention Andertoons should be at this link.

My favorite counter-intuitive implication is in analysis. The field has a definition for what it means that a function is continuous. It’s meant to capture the idea that you could draw a curve representing the function without having to lift the pen that does it. The best definition mathematicians have settled on allows you to count a function that’s continuous at a single point in all of space. Continuity seems like something that should need an interval to happen. But we haven’t found a better way to define “continuous” that excludes this pathological case. So we embrace the weirdness in exchange for general usefulness.

Charles Brubaker’s Ask A Cat for the 21st of January, 2019. Although I’ve mentioned this comic before, it wasn’t when I was putting up tags naming each comic. I’ll fix that now. This and future essays mentioning Ask A Cat (or its Fuzzy Princess sideline, as long as that hasn’t got its own GoComics presence) should appear at this link. And this strip previously ran the 19th of June, 2016.

Charles Brubaker’s Ask A Cat for the 21st is a guest appearance from Brubaker’s other strip, The Fuzzy Princess. It’s a rerun and I did discuss it earlier. Soap bubbles make for great mathematics. They’re easy to play with, for one thing. That’s good for capturing imagination. And the mathematics behind them is deep, and led to important results analytically and computationally. It happens when this strip first ran I’d encountered a triplet of essays about the mathematics of soap bubbles and wireframe surfaces. My introduction to those essays is here.

Benita Epstein’s Six Chix for the 25th I wasn’t sure I’d include. But Roy Kassinger asked about it, so that tipped the scales. The dog tries to blame his bad behavior on “the algorithm”, bringing up one of the better monsters of the last couple years. An algorithm is just the procedure by which you do something. Mathematically, that’s usually to solve a problem. That might be finding some interesting part of the domain or range of a function. That might be putting a collection of things in order. that might be any of a host of things. And then we go make a decision based on the results of the algorithm.

Benita Epstein’s Six Chix for the 25th of January, 2019. The essays wherein I mention Six Chix, from any of the shared strip’s authors, should appear at this link.

What earns The Algorithm its deserved bad name is mindlessness. The idea that once you have an algorithm that a problem is solved. Worse, that once an algorithm is in place it would be irrational to challenge it. I have seen the process termed “mathwashing”, by analogy with whitewashing, and it’s a good one. The notion that because something is done by computer it must be done correctly is absurd. We knew it was absurd before there were computers as we knew them, as see anyone for the past century who has spoken of a “Kafkaesque” interaction with a large organization. It’s impossible to foresee all the outcomes of any reasonably complicated process, much less to verify that all the outcomes are handled correctly. This is before we consider that there will always be mistakes made in the handling of data. Or in the carrying out of the process. And that’s before we consider bad actors. I’m sure there must be research into algorithms designed to handle gaming of the system. I don’t know that there are any good results yet, though. We certainly need them.

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There were a couple comics that didn’t seem to be substantial enough for me to write at length about. You might like them anyway. Connie Sun’s Connie to the Wonnie for the 21st shows off a Venn Diagram. Hector D Cantú and Carlos Castellanos’s Baldo for the 23rd is a bit of wordplay about what mathematicians do. Jonathan Lemon’s Rabbits Against Magic for the 23rd similarly is a bit of wordplay built around percentages. (Lemon is the new artist for Alley Oop.) And Keith Tutt and Daniel Saunders’s Lard’s World Peace Tips features Albert Einstein, and a joke based on one of the symmetries which make relativity such a useful explanation of the world’s workings.

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I don’t plan to have another Reading the Comics post until next Sunday. But when I do, it’ll be here.

Reading the Comics, January 16, 2019: Young People’s Mathematics Edition

Today’s quartet of mathematically-themed comic strips doesn’t have an overwhelming theme. There’s some bits about the mathematics that young people do, so, that’s enough to separate this from any other given day’s comics essay.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th is built on a bit of mathematical folklore. As Weinersmith’s mathematician (I don’t remember that we’ve been given her name) mentions, there is a belief that “revolutionary” mathematics is done by young people. That isn’t to say that older mathematicians don’t do great work. But the stereotype is that an older mathematician will produce masterpieces in already-established fields. It’s the young that establish new fields. Indeed, one of mathematics’s most prestigious awards, the Fields Medal, is only awarded to mathematicians under the age of forty. I was cheated of mine. Long story.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th of January, 2019. I have many essays inspired by something said in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. You can find them at this link.

There’s intuitive appeal in the idea that revolutions in thinking are for the young. We think that people get set in their ways as they develop their careers. We have a couple dramatic examples, most notably Évariste Galois, who developed what we now see as foundations of group theory and died at twenty. While the idea is commonly held, I don’t know that it’s actually true. That is, that it holds up to scrutiny. It seems hard to create a definition for “revolutionary mathematics” that could be agreed upon by two people. So it would be difficult to test at what age people do their most breathtaking work, and whether it is what they do when young or when experienced.

Is there harm to believing an unprovable thing? If it makes you give up on trying, yes. My suspicion is that true revolutionary work happens when a well-informed, deep thinker comes to a field that hasn’t been studied in that way before. And when it turns out to be a field well-suited to study that way. That doesn’t require youth. It requires skill in one field, and an understanding that there’s another field ready to be studied that way.

Will Henry’s Wallace the Brave for the 14th of January, 2019. I have only had a few chances to talk about Wallace the Brave so far, but the chances I’ve taken are at this link. (It and Breaking Cat News are the two recently-launched comics I’m most excited by.)

Will Henry’s Wallace the Brave for the 14th is a mathematics anxiety joke. Wallace tries to help by turning an abstract problem into a concrete one. This is often a good way to approach a problem. Even in more advanced mathematics, one can often learn the way to solve a general problem by trying a couple of specific examples. It’s almost as though there’s only a certain amount of abstraction people can deal with, and you need to re-cast problems so they stay within your limits.

Yes, the comments turn to complaining about Common Core. I’m not sure what would help Spud work through this problem (or problems in general). But thinking of alternate problems that estimated or approached what he really wanted might help. If he noticed, for example, that 10 + 12 has to be a little more than 10 + 10, and he found 10 + 10 easy, then he’d be close to a right answer. If he noticed that 10 + 12 had to be 10 + 10 + 2, and he found 10 + 10 easy, then he might find 20 + 2 easy as well. Maybe Spud would be better off thinking of ways to rewrite a problem without changing the result.

Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur for the 15th of January, 2019. Essays mentioning Non Sequitur should appear at this link.

Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur for the 15th mentions calculus. It’s more of a probability joke. To speak of a calculated risk is to speak of doing something that’s not certain, but that has enough of a payoff to be worth the cost of failure. But one problem with this attitude is that people are very, very bad at estimating probabilities. We have terrible ideas of how likely losses are and how uncertain rewards can be. But even if we allow that the risks and rewards are calculated right, there’s a problem with things you only do once. Or only can do once. You can get into a good debate about whether there’s even a meaningful idea of probability for things that happen only the one time. Life’s among them.

Bob Weber Sr’s Moose and Molly for the 16th of January, 2019. I haven’t had the chance to talk about Moose and Molly before. But now I have the tag, and will be putting essays mentioning it at this link.

Bob Weber Sr’s Moose and Molly for the 16th is a homework joke. It does actually depend on being mathematics homework, though, or there’d be no grounds for Moose’s kid to go to the savings and loan clerk who’ll help with “money problems”.

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I think there’s one more batch of comic strips to discuss this week. When I’ve published it, you should find the essay at this link. And then there’ll be Sunday again.

Reading the Comics, November 29, 2018: Closing Out November Edition

Today, I get to wrap up November’s suggested discussion topics as prepared by Comic Strip Master Command.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th mentions along its way the Liar Paradox and Zeno’s Paradoxes. Both are ancient problems. The paradoxes arise from thinking with care and rigor about things we seem to understand intuitively. For the Liar Paradox it’s about what we mean to declare a statement true or false. For Zeno’s Paradoxes it’s about whether we think space (and time) are continuous or discrete. And, as the strip demonstrates, there is a particular kind of nerd that declares the obvious answer is the only possible answer and that it’s foolish to think deeper. To answer a question’s literal words while avoiding its point is a grand old comic tradition, of course, predating even the antijoke about chickens crossing roads. Which is what gives these answers the air of an old stage comedian.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 27th of November, 2018. Other essays mentioning topics raised by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link. Well, all right, this link, if you want to avoid the maybe four times it hasn’t turned up.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 28th features a cameo for mathematics. At least mathematics class. It’s painted as the most tedious part of the school day. I’m not sure this is quite right for Lio as a character. He’s clever in a way that I think harmonizes well with how mathematics brings out universal truths. But there is a difference between mathematics and mathematics class, of course.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 28th of November, 2018. Essays discussing topics raised by Lio should be at this link.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2am for the 28th shows how well my resolution to drop the strip from my rotation here has gone. I don’t seem to have found it worthy of mention before, though. It plays on the difference between a note of money, the number of units of currency that note represents, and between “zero” and “nothing”. Also I’m enchanted now by the idea that maybe some government might publish a zero-dollar bill. At least for the sake of movie and television productions that need realistic-looking cash.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2am rerun for the 28th of November, 2018. It first appeared the 12th of April, 2000. Other instances of Randolph Itch, 2 am that I thought worth discussing are at this link.

In the footer joke Randolph mentions how you can never have enough zeroes. Yes, but I’d say that’s true of twenties, too. There is a neat sense in which this is true for working mathematicians, though. At least for those doing analysis. One of the reliable tricks that we learn to do in analysis is to “add zero” to a quantity. This is, literally, going from some expression that might be, say, “a – b” to “a + 0 – b”, which of course has the same value. The point of doing that is that we know other things equal to zero. For example, for any number L, “-L + L” is zero. So we get the original expression from “a + 0 – b” over to “a – L + L – b”. And that becomes useful is you picked L so that you know something about “a – L” and about “L – b”. Because then it tells you something about “a – b” that you didn’t know before. Picking that L, and showing something true about “a – L” and “L – b”, is the tricky part.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 29th of November, 2018. Other appearances by Looks Good On Paper should be at this link.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 29th is back with another Möbius Strip comic strip. Last time it was presented as the “Möbius Trip”, a looping journey. This time it’s a comic strip proper. If this particular Looks Good On Paper has run before I don’t seem to have mentioned it. Unlike the “Möbius Trip” comic, this one looks more clearly like it actually is a Möbius strip.

The Dumpties in the comic strip are presented as getting nauseated at the strange curling around. It’s good sense for the comic-in-the-comic, which just has to have something happen and doesn’t really need to make sense. But there is no real way to answer where a Möbius strip wraps around itself. I mean, we can declare it’s at the left and right ends of the strip as we hold it, sure. But this is an ad hoc placement. We can roll the belt along a little bit, not changing its shape, but changing the points where we think of the strip as turning over.

But suppose you were a flat creature, wandering a Möbius strip. Would you have any way to tell that you weren’t on the plane? You could, but it takes some subtle work. Like, you could try drawing shapes. These let you count a thing called the Euler Characteristic, which relates the numer of vertices, edges, and faces of a polyhedron. The Euler Characteristic for a Möbius strip is the same as that for a Klein bottle, a cylinder, or a torus. You could try drawing regions, and coloring them in, calling on the four-color map theorem. (Here I want just to mention the five-color map theorem, which is as these things go easy to prove.) A map on the plane needs at most four colors to have no neighboring territories share a color along an edge. (Territories here are contiguous, and we don’t count territories meeting at only a point as sharing an edge.) Same for a sphere, which is good for we folks who have the job of coloring in both globes and atlases. It’s also the same for a cylinder. On a Möbius strip, this number is six. On a torus, it’s seven. So we could tell, if we were on a Möbius strip, that we were. It can be subtle to prove, is all.

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All of my regular Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link. The next in my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z glossary should be posted Tuesday. I’m glad for it if you do come around and read again.

Reading the Comics, November 24, 2018: Origins Edition

I’m not sure there is a theme to the back half of last week’s mathematically-based comic strips. If there is, it’s about showing some origins of things. I’ll go with that title, then.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 21st is another in the curious thread of strips about Fi talking about mathematics. She’s presented as doing a good job inspiring kids to appreciate mathematics as a fun, exciting, interesting thing to think about. It’s good work. And I hope this does not sound like I am envious of a more successful, if fictional, mathematics popularizer. But I don’t see much in the strip of her doing this side job well. That is, of making the case that mathematics is worth the time spent on it. That’s a lot to ask given the confines of a syndicated daily newspaper comic strip, yes. What we can expect is some hint of what the actual good argument would look like. But this particular day’s strip rings false to me, for example. I don’t see how “here’s some pizza — but first, here’s a pop quiz” makes mathematics look as something other than a chore.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 21st of November, 2018. Essays mentioning topics raised by On The Fastrack are at this link.

Pizza area offers many ways into mathematical ideas. How the area depends on the size of the pizza, for example. How the area depends on the shape, even independently of the size. How to slice a pizza fairly, especially if it’s not to be between four or six or eight people. What is the strangest shape you could make that would give people equal areas? Just the way slices intersect at angles inspires neat little geometry problems. How you might arrange toppings opens up symmetries and tilings, which are surprisingly big areas of mathematics. Setting problems on a pizza gives them a tangibility that could help capture young minds, surely. But I can’t make myself believe that this is a conversation to have when the pizza is entering the room.

Mike Peters’s Mother Goose and Grimm for the 22nd of November, 2018. Other essays which mention Mother Goose and Grimm should be at this link. I had thought this was a new link, but it turns out there was a strip in early 2017 and another in mid-2015 that got my attention here.

Mike Peters’s Mother Goose and Grimm for the 22nd is a lottery joke. So if we suppose this was written about the last time the Powerball jackpot reached a half-billion dollars we can work out how far ahead of publication Mike Peters is working. One solid argument against ever buying a lottery ticket is, as Grimm notes, that you have zero chance of winning. (I’m open to an argument based on expectation value. And even more, I don’t object to people spending a reasonable bit of disposable income “foolishly”.) Mother Goose argues that her chances are vastly worse if she doesn’t buy a ticket. This is true. Are her chances “astronomically” worse? … That depends. A one in three hundred million chance (to use, roughly, the Powerball odds) is so small that it won’t happen to you. Is that any different than a zero in three hundred million chance [*]? Or than a six in three hundred million chance? In any case it won’t happen to you.

[*] Do you actually have zero chance of winning if you don’t have a ticket? I say no, you don’t. Someone might give you a winning ticket. Maybe you find one as a bookmark in a library book. Maybe you find it on the street and figure, what the heck, I’ll check. Unlikely? Sure. But impossible? Hardly.

Johnny Hart’s Back to BC for the 22nd of November, 2018. It originally appeared the 27th of May, 1961. Essays which discuss topics brought up by B.C., both the current-run and the half-century-old reruns, are at this link.

Johnny Hart’s Back to BC for the 22nd has the form of the world’s oldest story problem. It could also be a joke about the discovery of the concept of zero and the struggle to understand it as a number. Given that clams are used as currency in the BC setting it also shows how finance has driven mathematical development. So the strip actually packs a fair bit of stuff into two panels. … And I’ll admit I’m not quite sure the joke parses, but if you read it quickly it looks like a good enough joke.

Johnny Hart’s Back to BC for the 24th of November, 2018. It originally appeared the 30th of May, 1961. If this strip has inspired any essays oh wait, I already said where to find them, didn’t I? Well, you know what to look for, then.

Johnny Hart’s Back to BC for the 24th is a more obvious joke. And it’s built on the learning abilities of animals, and the number sense of animals. A large animal stomping a foot evokes, to me at least, Clever Hans. This is a horse presented in the early 20th century as being able to actually do arithmetic. The horse would be given a question and would stop his hoof enough times to get to the right answer. However good the horse’s number sense might be, he had quite good behavioral sense. It turned out — after brilliant and pioneering work in animal cognition — that Hans was observing his trainer’s body language. When Wilhelm von Osten was satisfied that there’d been the right number of stomps, the horse stopped. This is sometimes presented as Hans `merely’ taking subconscious cues from his trainer. But consider how carefully the horse must be observing an animal with a very different body, and how it must have understood cues of satisfaction. I can’t call that `mere’. And the work of tracking down a signal that von Osten himself did not know he was sending (and, apparently, never accepted that he did) is also amazing. It serves as a reminder how hard biologists and zoologists have to work.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 24th of November, 2018. The many essays mentioning topics raised by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 24th gives a bit of Dad History about perspective. And, particularly, why artists didn’t seem to use it much before the 16th century. It gets more blatantly tied to mathematics by pointing out how it took ten thousand years of civilization to get Cartesian coordinates. We can argue about how many years civilization has been around. But it does seem strange that we went along for certainly the majority of that time without Cartesian coordinates. They seem so obvious it’s almost hard to not think of them. Many good ideas have such a legacy.

It’s easy to say why older pictures didn’t use perspective, though. For the most part, artists didn’t think perspective gave them something they wanted to show. Ancient peoples knew of perspective. It’s not as if ancient peoples were any dumber than we are, or any less able to look at square tiles held at different angles and at different distances. But we can convey information about the importance of things, or the flow of action of things, using position and relative size. That can be more important than showing that yes, an artist is aware that a square building far away looks small.

I’m less sure what I know about the history of coordinate systems, though, and particularly why it took until René Descartes to describe them. We have a legend of Descartes laying in bed, watching a fly on the tiled ceiling, and realizing he could describe where the fly was by what row and column of tile it was on. (In the past I have written this as though it happened. In writing this essay I went looking for a primary source and found nobody seems to have one. I shall try not to pass it on again without being very clear that it is just a legend.) But there have been tiled floors and walls and ceilings for a very long time. There have been flies even longer. Why didn’t anyone notice this?

One answer may be that they did. We just haven’t heard about it, because it was found by someone who didn’t catch the interest of a mathematical community. There’s likely a lot of such lost mathematics out there. But still, why not? Wouldn’t anyone with a mathematical inclination see that this is plainly a great discovery? And maybe not. What made Cartesian coordinates great was the realization that arithmetic and geometry, previously seen as separate liberal arts, were duals. A problem in one had an expression as a problem in the other. If you don’t make that connection, then Cartesian coordinates don’t solve any problems you have. They’re just a new way to index things you didn’t need indexed. So that would slow down using them any.

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All of my regular Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link. Tomorrow should see the posting of my next my Fall 2018 Mathematics A To Z essay. And there’s still time to put in requests for the last half-dozen letters of the alphabet.

Reading the Comics, November 16, 2018: The Rest Of The Week Edition

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.)

Alex Hallatt’s Arctic Circle for the 12th of November, 2018. Other essays based on Arctic Circle should be at this link.

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 of November, 2018. It originally ran the 17th of February, 1983. Never mind the copyright notice; those would often show the previous year the first couple weeks of the year. Essays based on topics raised by Bloom County — original or modern continuation — should be at this link.

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 of November, 2018. Other essays based on Bent Objects will be at this link. It’s a new tag, so for now, there’s just that.

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 of November, 2018. In case there’s ever another essay which mentions Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal it’ll be at this link.

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 of November, 2018. And times I’ve discussed something from Rhymes With Orange should be at this link.

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.

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And as ever, all my Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link.

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.

Reading the Comics, November 9, 2018: Standing For Things Edition

There was something in common in two of the last five comic strips worth attention from last week. That’s good enough to give the essay its name.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 8th showcases Toby discovering the point of letters in algebra. It’s easy to laugh at him being ignorant. But the use of letters this way is something it’s easy to miss. You need first to realize that we don’t need to have a single way to represent a number. Which is implicit in learning, say, that you can write ‘7’ as the Roman numeral ‘VII’ or so, but I’m not sure that’s always clear. And realizing that you could use any symbol to write out ‘7’ if you agree that’s what the symbol means? That’s an abstraction tossed onto people who often aren’t really up for that kind of abstraction. And that we can have a symbol for “a number whose identity we don’t yet know”? Or even “a number whose identity we don’t care about”? Don’t blame someone for rearing back in confusion at this.

Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 8th of November, 2018. I’m sorry I can’t figure out the names of Toby’s friends here. Character lists, cartoonists, please.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 8th talks about vectors and scalars. And about the little ways that instructors in one subject can sabotage one another. In grad school I was witness to the mathematics department feeling quite put-upon by the engineering departments, who thought we were giving their students inadequate calculus training. Meanwhile we couldn’t figure out what they were telling students about calculus except that it was screwing up their understanding.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 8th of November, 2018. Also, shouldn’t that be “displacement in apple-space”?

To a physicist, a vector is a size and a direction together. (At least until they get seriously into mathematical physics when they need a more abstract idea.) A scalar is a number. Like, a real-valued number such as ‘4’. Maybe a complex-valued number such as ‘4 + 6i’. Vectors are great because a lot of physics problems become easier when thought of in terms of directions and amounts in that direction.

A mathematician would start out with vectors and scalars like that. But then she’d move into a more abstract idea. A vector, to a mathematician, is a thing you can add to another vector and get a vector out. A scalar is something that’s not a vector but that, multiplied by a vector, gets you a vector out. This sounds circular. But by defining ‘vector’ and ‘scalar’ in how they interact with each other we get a really sweet flexibility. We can use the same reasoning — and the same proofs — for lots of things. Directions, yes. But also matrices, and continuous functions, and probabilities of events, and more. That’s a bit much to give the engineering student who’s trying to work out some problem about … I don’t know. Whatever they do over in that department. Truss bridges or electrical circuits or something.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy rerun for the 9th of November, 2018. It first ran the 19th of March, 2012.

Mark Leiknes’s Cow and Boy for the 9th is really about misheard song lyrics, a subject that will never die now that we don’t have the space to print lyrics in the album lining anymore, or album linings. But it has a joke resonant with that of The Buckets, in supposing that algebra is just some bunch of letters mixed up with numbers. And Cow and Boy was always a strip I loved, as baffling as it might be to a casual reader. It had a staggering number of running jokes, although not in this installment.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 9th of November, 2018. It first ran the 9th of November, 1990.

Greg Evans’s Luann Againn for the 9th shows Brad happy to work out arithmetic when it’s for something he’d like to know. The figure Luan gives is ridiculously high, though. If he needs 500 hairs, and one new hair grows in each week, then that’s a little under ten years’ worth of growth. Nine years and a bit over seven months to be exact. If a moustache hair needs to be a half-inch long, and it grows at 1/8th of an inch per month, then it takes four months to be sufficiently long. So in the slowest possible state it’d be nine years, eleven months. I can chalk Luann’s answer up to being snidely pessimistic about his hair growth. But his calculator seems to agree and that suggests something went wrong along the way.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 9th of November, 2018. Again, character lists. I don’t know which of the characters this is except that he’s either very small or has an enormous pencil.

John Zakour and Scott Roberts’s Maria’s Day for the 9th is a story problem joke. It looks to me like a reasonable story problem, too: the distance travelled and the speed are reasonable, and give sensible numbers. The two stops add a bit of complication that doesn’t seem out of line. And the kid’s confusion is fair enough. It takes some experience to realize that the problem splits into an easy part, a hard part, and an easy part. The first easy part is how long the stops take all together. That’s 25 minutes. The hard part is realizing that if you want to know the total travel time it doesn’t matter when the stops are. You can find the total travel time by adding together the time spent stopped with the time spent driving. And the other easy part is working out how long it takes to go 80 miles if you travel at 55 miles per hour. That’s just a division. So find that and add to it the 25 minutes spent at the two stops.

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The various Reading the Comics posts should all be at this link. Essays which discuss The Buckets are at this link. The incredibly many essays mentioning Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link. Essays which mention Cow and Boy are at this link. Essays inspired in part by Luann, both the current-day and the vintage 1990 run, are at this link. The credibly many essays mentioning Maria’s Day are at this link.

And through the end of December my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should have two new posts a week. You might like some of them.

Reading the Comics, November 5, 2018: November 5, 2018 Edition

This past week included one of those odd days that’s so busy I get a column’s worth of topics from a single day’s reading. And there was another strip (the Cow and Boy rerun) which I might have roped in had the rest of the week been dead. The Motley rerun might have made the cut too, for a reference to .

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 5th is a joke about resisting the story problem. I’m surprised by the particulars of this question. Turning an arithmetic problem into counts of some number of particular things is common enough and has a respectable history. But slices of broccoli quiche? I’m distracted by the choice, and I like quiche. It’s a weird thing for a kid to have, and a weird amount for anybody to have.

Jason Chatfield’s Ginger Meggs for the 5th of November, 2018. I’m of the age cohort to remember Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche being a book people had for some reason. Also not understanding why “real men” would not eat quiche. If you named the same dish “Cheddar Bacon Pie” you’d have men lined up for a quarter-mile to get it. Anyway, it took me too long to work out but I think the teacher’s name is Mr Crackett? Cast lists, cartoonists. We need cast lists on your comic’s About pages.

JC Duffy’s Lug Nuts for the 5th uses mathematics as a shorthand for intelligence. And it particularly uses π as shorthand for mathematics. There’s a lot of compressed concepts put into this. I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s rerun come mid-March.

JC Duffy’s Lug Nuts for the 5th of November, 2018. OK, some of these strips I don’t need a cast list for.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am for the 5th I’ve highlighted before. It’s the pie chart joke. It will never stop amusing me, but I suppose I should take Randolph Itch, 2 am out of my rotation of comics I read to include here.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am for the 5th of November, 2018. I never get to presentations like this. It’s always someone explaining the new phone system.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 5th is a logic puzzle joke. And a set theory joke. Dad is trying to argue he can’t be surprised by his gift because it’ll belong to one of two sets of things. And he receives nothing. This ought to defy his expectations, if we think of “nothing” as being “the empty set”. The empty set is an indispensable part of set theory. It’s a set that has no elements, has nothing in it. Then suppose we talk about what it means for one set to be contained in another. Take what seems like an uncontroversial definition: set A is contained in set B if there’s nothing in A which is not also in B. Then the empty set is contained inside every set. So Dad, having supposed that he can’t be surprised, since he’d receive either something that is “socks” or something that is “not-socks”, does get surprised. He gets the one thing that is both “socks” and “not-socks” simultaneously.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 5th of November, 2018. I may have mentioned. So my partner in Modern Physics Lab one time figured to organize his dorm room by sorting everything in it into two piles, “pair of socks” and “not a pair of socks”. I asked him how he’d classify two socks that, while mismatched, were bundled together. He informed me that he hated me.

I hate to pull this move a third time in one week (see here and here), but the logic of the joke doesn’t work for me. I’ll go along with “nothing” as being “the empty set” for these purposes. And I’ll accept that “nothing” is definitely “not-socks”. But to say that “nothing” is also “socks” is … weird, unless you are putting it in the language of set theory. I think the joke would be saved if it were more clearly established that Dad should be expecting some definite thing, so that no-thing would defy all expectations.

“Nothing” is a difficult subject to treat logically. I have been exposed a bit to the thinking of professional philosophers on the subject. Not enough that I feel I could say something non-stupid about the subject. But enough to say that yeah, they’re right, we have a really hard time describing “nothing”. The null set is better behaved. I suppose that’s because logicians have been able to tame it and give it some clearly defined properties.

Mike Shiell’s The Wandering Melon for the 5th of November, 2018. I am curious whether this is meant to be the same lottery winner who in August got struck by lightning. It would make the torn, singed check make more direct sense. But what are the odds someone wins the lottery, gets hit by lightning, and then eaten by a crocodile? … Ah well, at least nothing worse is going to happen to him.

Mike Shiell’s The Wandering Melon for the 5th felt like a rerun to me. It wasn’t. But Shiell did do a variation on this joke in August. Both are built on the same whimsy of probability. It’s unlikely one will win a lottery. It’s unlikely one will die in a particular and bizarre way. What are the odds someone would have both things happen to them?

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This and every Reading the Comics post should be at this link. Essays that include Ginger Meggs are at this link. Essays in which I discuss Lug Nuts are at this link. Essays mentioning Randolph Itch, 2 am, should be at this link. The many essays with a mention of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link. And essays where I’m inspired by something in The Wandering Melon should be at this link. And, what the heck, when I really discuss Cow and Boy it’s at this link. Real discussions of Motley are at this link. And my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z averages two new posts a week, now and through December. Thanks again for reading.

Reading the Comics, October 27, 2018: Surprise Rerun Edition

While putting together the last comics from a week ago I realized there was a repeat among them. And a pretty recent repeat too. I’m supposing this is a one-off, but who can be sure? We’ll get there. I figure to cover last week’s mathematically-themed comics in posts on Wednesday and Thursday, subject to circumstances.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 26th is a joking reminder that educational texts, including in mathematics, don’t have to be boring. We can have narrative thrust and energy. It’s a good reminder.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 26th of October, 2018.

As fits the joke, the bit of calculus in this textbook paragraph is wrong. does not equal . This is even ignoring that we should expect, with an indefinite integral like this, a constant of integration. An indefinite integral like this is equal to a family of related functions. But it’s common shorthand to write out one representative function. But the indefinite integral of is not . You can confirm that by differentiating . The result is nothing like . Differentiating an indefinite integral should get the original function back. Here are the rules you need to do that for yourself.

As I make it out, a correct indefinite integral would be:

Plus that “constant of integration” the value of which we can’t tell just from the function we want to indefinitely-integrate. I admit I haven’t double-checked that I’m right in my work here. I trust someone will tell me if I’m not. I’m going to feel proud enough if I can get the LaTeX there to display.

Stephen Beals’s Adult Children rerun for the 27th of October, 2018. It also appeared the 31st of March, 2018. I’m surprised it was that recent. I can’t blame Beals if he needed a break. This is a Halloween-ready example of the comic.

Stephen Beals’s Adult Children for the 27th has run already. It turned up in late March of this year. Michael Spivak’s Calculus is a good choice for representative textbook. Calculus holds its terrors, too. Even someone who’s gotten through trigonometry can find the subject full of weird, apparently arbitrary rules. And formulas like those in the above paragraph.

Rob Harrell’s Big Top rerun for the 27th of October, 2018. It originally appeared the 13th of December, 2008.

Rob Harrell’s Big Top for the 27th is a strip about the difficulties of splitting a restaurant bill. And they’ve not even got to calculating the tip. (Maybe it’s just a strip about trying to push the group to splitting the bill a way that lets you off cheap. I haven’t had to face a group bill like this in several years. My skills with it are rusty.)

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 27th of October, 2018. Does the weight count if the jack-o-lantern is wearing sneakers?

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 27th is a Pi Day joke shifted to the Halloween season.

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And I have more Reading the Comics post at this link. Since it’s not true that every one of these includes a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal mention, you can find those that have one at this link. Essays discussing Adult Children, including the first time this particular strip appeared, are at this link. Essays with a mention of Big Top are at this link. And essays with a mention of Reality Check are at this link. Furthermore, this month and the rest of this year my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z should continue. And it is open for requests for more of the alphabet.

Reading the Comics, October 19, 2018: More Short Things Edition

At least, I’d thought the last half of last week’s comics were mostly things I could discuss quickly. Then Frank and Ernest went and sprawled on me. Such will happen.

Before I get to that, I did want to mention that Gregory Taylor’s paneling for votes for the direction his mathematics-inspired serial takes:

Want to affect the direction of a serial with your votes? "Chanced Erasures" continues, new parts every couple weeks: https://t.co/Zpv5DTEi6F

— Gregory Taylor (@mathtans) October 22, 2018

You may enjoy; at least, give it a try.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 18th is a bit of wordplay. There’s something interesting culturally about phrasing “lots of math, but no chemistry”. Algorithms as mathematics makes sense. Much of mathematics is about finding processes to do interesting things. Algorithms, and the mathematics which justifies them, can at least in principle be justified with deductive logic. And we like to think that the universe must make deductive-logical sense. So it is easy to suppose that something mathematical simply must make logical sense.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 18th of October, 2018. One might argue this just represents the algorithm not having enough data. That there are aspects to both people which were poorly modelled. Could happen.

Chemistry, though. It’s a metaphor for whatever the difference is between a thing’s roster of components and the effect of the whole. The suggestion is that it is mysterious and unpredictable. It’s an attitude strange to actual chemists, who have a rather good understanding of why most things happen. My suspicion is that this sense of chemistry is old, dating to before we had a good understanding of why chemical bonds work. We have that understanding thanks to quantum mechanics, and its mathematical representations.

But we can still allow for things that happen but aren’t obvious. When we write about “emergent properties” we describe things which are inherent in whatever we talk about. But they only appear when the things are a large enough mass, or interact long enough. Some things become significant only when they have enough chance to be seen.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 18th of October, 2018. I wrote all this text assuming Weinersmith meant Zeno of Elea. It’d be a heck of a thing if he meant Zeno, the Omni-King of the 12 Universes that I’m told is a thing in Dragon Ball. I guess they have different character designs.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 18th is about mathematicians’ favorite Ancient Greek philosopher they haven’t actually read. (In fairness, Zeno is hard to read, even for those who know the language.) Zeno’s famous for four paradoxes, the most familiar of which is alluded to here. To travel across a space requires travelling across half of it first. But this applies recursively. To travel any distance requires accomplishing infinitely many partial-crossings. How can you do infinitely many things, each of which take more than zero time, in less than an infinitely great time? But we know we do this; so, what aren’t we understanding? A callow young mathematics major would answer: well, pick any tiny interval of time you like. All but a handful of the partial-crossings take less than your tiny interval time. This seems like a sufficient answer and reason to chuckle at philosophers. Fine; an instant has zero time elapse during it. Nothing must move during that instant, then. So when does movement happen, if there is no movement during all the moments of time? Reconciling these two points slows the mathematician down.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 19th of October, 2018. I’d imagine he would have a sufficient excuse in his arms not being able to reach the chalkboard, actually.

Patrick Roberts’s Todd the Dinosaur for the 19th mentions fractions. It’s only used to list a kind of mathematics problem a student might feign unconsciousness rather than do. And takes quite little space in the word balloon to describe. It’d be the same joke if Todd were asked to come up and give a ten-minute presentation on the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set for the 19th of October, 2018. It ran originally the 12th of December, 2007. Among the stray, side, filler jokes, I like best that both Earl and Burl have mugs reading “And Dumber”.

Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set for the 19th mentions the Rubik’s Cube. Sometime I should do a proper essay about its mathematics. Any Rubik’s Cube can be solved in at most 20 moves. And it’s apparently known there are some cube configurations that take at least 20 moves, so, that’s nice to have worked out. But there are many approaches to solving a cube, none of which I am competent to do. Some algorithms are, apparently, easier for people to learn, at the cost of taking more steps. And that’s fine. You should understand something before you try to do it efficiently.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 19th of October, 2018. So … life is the intersection of Thanksgiving, the Bible, and Sports? … I could see the case for that.

John Atkinson’s Wrong Hands for the 19th is the Venn Diagram joke for the week. Good to have one around.

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This and my other Reading the Comics posts are available at this link. The essays mentioning Frank and Ernest should be at this link. For just the Reading the Comics posts with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal content try this link. Essays which talk about things raised by Todd the Dinosaur are at this link. Posts that write about The Dinette Set are at this link. And the essays based on Wrong Hands should be at this link. And do please stick around for more of my Fall 2018 Mathematics A-To-Z, with another post due tomorrow that I need to write today.

Reading the Comics, October 11, 2018: Under Weather Edition

I ended up not finding more comics on-topic on GoComics yesterday. So this past week’s mathematically-themed strips should fit into two posts well. I apologize for any loss of coherence in this essay, as I’m getting a bit of a cold. I’m looking forward to what this cold does for the A To Z essays coming Tuesday and Friday this week, too.

Stephen Beals’s Adult Children for the 7th uses Albert Einstein’s famous equation as shorthand for knowledge. I’m a little surprised it’s written out in words, rather than symbols. This might reflect that is often understood just as this important series of sounds, rather than as an equation relating things to one another. Or it might just reflect the needs of the page composition. It could be too small a word balloon otherwise.

Stephen Beals’s Adult Children for the 7th of October, 2018. I’m still not sure how I feel about this strip’s use of slightly offset panels like this.

Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set for the 9th continues the thread of tip-calculation jokes around here. I have no explanation for this phenomenon. In this case, Burl is doing the calculation correctly. If the tip is supposed to be 15% of the bill, and the bill is reduced 10%, then the tip would be reduced 10%. If you already have the tip calculated, it might be quicker to figure out a tenth of that rather than work out 15% of the original bill. And, yes, the characters are being rather unpleasantly penny-pinching. That was just the comic strip’s sense of humor.

Julie Larson’s The Dinette Set for the 9th of October, 2018. This is a rerun; it originally ran the 2nd of December, 2007.

Todd Clark’s Lola for the 9th take the form of your traditional grumbling about story problems. It also shows off the motif of updating of the words in a story problem to be awkwardly un-hip. The problem seems to be starting in a confounding direction anyway. The first sentence isn’t out and it’s introducing the rate at which Frank is shedding social-media friends over time and the rate at which a train is travelling, some distancer per time. Having one quantity with dimensions friends-per-time and another with dimensions distance-per-time is begging for confusion. Or for some weird gibberish thing, like, determining something to be (say) ninety mile-friends. There’s trouble ahead.

Todd Clark’s Lola for the 9th of October, 2018. Don’t let your eye be distracted by the coloring job done on Lola’s eyeglasses in the last panel there.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 10th proposes naming a particular kind of series. A series is the sum of a sequence of numbers. It doesn’t have to be a sequence with infinitely many numbers in it, but it usually is, if it’s to be an interesting series. Properly, a series gets defined by something like the symbols in the upper caption of the panel:

Here the ‘i’ is a “dummy variable”, of no particular interest and not even detectable once the calculation is done. It’s not that thing with the square roots of -1 in thise case. ‘i’ is specifically known as the ‘index’, since it indexes the terms in the sequence. Despite the logic of i-index, I prefer to use ‘j’, ‘k’, or ‘n’. This avoids confusion with that square-root-of-minus-1 meaning for i. The index starts at some value, the one to the right of the equals sign underneath the capital sigma; in this case, 1. The sequence evaluates whatever the formula described by is, for each whole number between that lowest ‘i’, in this case 1, and whatever the value above the sigma is. For the infinite series, that’s infinitely large. That is, work out for every counting number ‘i’. For the first sum in the caption, that highest number is 4, and you only need to evaluate four terms and add them together. There’s no rule given for in the caption; that just means that, in this case, we don’t yet have reason to care what the formula is.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 10th of October, 2018. And if you think that’s a not-really-needed name for a kind of series, note that MathWorld has a definition for the “FoxTrot Series” based on one problem from the FoxTrot comic strip from 1998.

This is the way to define a series if we’re being careful, and doing mathematics properly. But there are shorthands, and we fall back on them all the time. On the blackboard is one of them: . The at the end of a summation like this means “carry on this pattern for infinitely many terms”. If it appears in the middle of a summation, like it means “carry on this pattern for the appropriate number of terms”. In that case, it would be .

The flaw with this “carry on this pattern” is that, properly, there’s no such thing as “the” pattern. There are infinitely many ways to continue from whatever the start was, and they’re all equally valid. What lets this scheme work is cultural expectations. We expect the difference between one term and the next to follow some easy patterns. They increase or decrease by the same amount as we’ve seen before (an arithmetic progression, like 2 + 4 + 6 + 8, increasing by two each time). They increase or decrease by the same ratio as we’ve seen before (a geometric progression, like 24 + 12 + 6 + 3, cutting in half each time). Maybe the sign alternates, or changes by some straightforward rule. If it isn’t one of these, then we have to fall back on being explicit. In this case, it would be that .

The capital-sigma as shorthand for “sum” traces to Leonhard Euler, because of course. I’m finding it hard, in my copy of Florian Cajori’s History of Mathematical Notations, to find just where the series notation as we use it got started. Also I’m not finding where ellipses got into mathematical notation either. It might reflect everybody realizing this was a pretty good way to represent “we’re not going to write out the whole thing here”.

Norm Feuti’s Retail for the 11th of October, 2018. Yes, the comments include people explaining how people doing Common Core mathematics would never find an answer to “30% off $20”. Also a commenter who explains how one would, probably do it: “30% of 10 is 3. 20 is twice 20, so, 30% off 20 would be twice 3, or 6. So, 20 minus 6, or 14.” Followed by someone saying that if you did it by real math, it would be .7 times 20.

Norm Feuti’s Retail for the 11th riffs on how many people, fundamentally, don’t know what percentages are. I think it reflects thinking of a percentage as some kind of unit. We get used to measurements of things, like, pounds or seconds or dollars or degrees or such that are fixed in value. But a percentage is relative. It’s a fraction of some original quantity. A difference of (say) two pounds in weight is the same amount of weight whatever the original was; why wouldn’t two percent of the weight behave similarly? … Gads, yes, I feel for the next retailer who gets these customers.

I think I’ve already used the story from when I worked in the bookstore about the customer concerned whether the ten-percent-off sticker applied before or after sales tax was calculated. So I’ll only share if people ask to hear it. (They won’t ask.)

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When I’m not getting a bit ill, I put my Reading the Comics posts at this link. Essays which mention Adult Children are at this link. Essays with The Dinette Set discussions should be at this link. The essays inspired by Lola are at this link. There’s some mention of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal in essays at link, or pretty much every Reading the Comics post. And Retail gets discussed at this link.

Reading the Comics, September 22, 2018: Last Chance Edition

I plan tomorrow to have another of my Mathematics A To Z posts. This weekend I’ll publish this month’s Playful Mathematics Blog Carnival. So if you’ve seen any web site, blog, video, podcast, or other reference that had something that delighted and taught you something, this is your last chance to let me know, and let my audience know about it. Please leave a comment if you know about anything I ought to see. Thank you.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 20th is a numerals and a wordplay joke. It is not hard to make numerals tattooed on a person an alarming thing. But when done with (I trust) the person’s consent, and done whimsically like this, it’s more a slightly odd bit of play.

Mark Tatulli’s Lio for the 20th of September, 2018. It … seems a little out of the usual run of Lio‘s sense of humor, but then I don’t know where else Tatulli could have used the joke.

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 21st is ultimately a strip about motivating someone to learn arithmetic. Agnes’s reasoning is sound, though. If the only reason to learn this unpleasant chore is because your job may need it, why not look at another job? We wouldn’t try to convince someone who didn’t want to learn French that they’ll need it for their job as … a tour guide in Quebec? There’s plenty of work that doesn’t need that. I suspect kids don’t buy “this is good for your future job” as a reason. Even if it were, general education should not be job training either.

Tony Cochrane’s Agnes for the 21st of September, 2018. Agnes doesn’t pursue being a mortician, at least this time, and instead tries out keeping a journal.

Juba’s Viivi and Wagner for the 21st gives Wagner a short-lived ambition to be a wandering mathematician. The abacus serves as badge of office. There are times and places that his ambition wouldn’t be completely absurd. Before the advent of electric and electronic computing, people who could calculate were worth hiring for their arithmetic. In 18th Century London there was a culture of “penny universities”, people with academic training making a living by giving lectures and courses to whatever members of the public cared to come to their talk, often in coffee-houses or barns.

Juba’s Viivi and Wagner for the 21st of September, 2018. This puts me in mind of a Peanuts where Sally Brown wondered about what if their father lost their job. What could she do to help the family earn its living? She suggested: she could make her bed.

Mathematicians learn that there used to be public spectacles, mathematicians challenging one another to do problems, with real cash or jobs on the line. They learn this because one such challenge figures in to the story of Gerolamo Cardano and Niccolò Fontana, known as Tartaglia. It’s about how we learned formulas to solve some kinds of polynomials. You may sense uncertainty in my claim there. It’s because it turns out it’s hard to find clear records of this sort of challenge outside the Cardano-Tartaglia match. That isn’t to say these things weren’t common. It’s just that I’ve been slowly learning to be careful about my claims.

(I’m aided here by a startling pair of episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast. This pair — “Trivial Pursuits: Fourteenth Century Logic” and “Sara Uckleman on Obligations” — describe a fascinating logic game that sounds like it would still be a great party game, for which there’s numerous commentaries and rule sets and descriptions of how to play. But no records of people actually ever playing it, or talking about games they had played, or complaining about being cheated out of a win or stuff like that. It’s a strong reminder to look closely at what your evidence does support.)

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 22nd of September, 2018. So do you think the father is really into the luchador show in the last panel or is he just going along with this while his kid comes to hate promises of fun?

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 22nd is the comforting return of Zach Weinersmith to these essays. And yes, it’s horrible parenting to promise something fun and have it turn out to be a mathematics lecture, but that’s part of the joke.

Karl Weierstrass was a real person, and a great mathematician best known for giving us a good, rigorous idea of what a limit is. We need limits because, besides their being nice things to have, calculus depends on them. At least, calculus depends on thinking about calculations on infinitely many things. Or on things infinitesimally small. Trying to do this works pretty well, much of the time. But you can also start calculating like this and get nonsense. How to tell whether your particular calculation works out or is nonsense?

Weierstrass worked out a good, rigorous idea for what we mean by a limit. It mostly tracks with what we’d intuitively expect. And it avoids all the dangerous spots we’ve noticed so far. Particularly, it doesn’t require us to ever look at anything that’s infinitely vast, or infinitesimally small. Anything we calculate on is done with regular arithmetic, that we’re quite confident in. But it lets us draw conclusions about the infinitely numerous or tiny. It’s brilliant work. When it’s presented to someone in the start of calculus, it leaves them completely baffled but they can maybe follow along with the rules. When it’s presented to mathematics majors in real analysis, it leaves them largely baffled but they can maybe follow along with the reasons. Somewhere around grad school I got comfortable with it, even excited. Weierstrass’s sort of definition turns up all over the place in real and in functional analysis. So at the least you get very comfortable with it.

So it is part of Weinersmith’s joke that this is way above that kid’s class level. As a joke, that fails for me. The luchador might as well be talking complete nonsense and the kid would realize that right away. There’s not the threat that this is something he ought to be able to understand. But it will probably always be funny to imagine mathematician wrestlers. Can count on that. I didn’t mean that as a joke, but you’ll notice I’m letting it stand.

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And with that, you know what I figure to post on Sunday. It and my other Reading the Comics posts should be at this tag. Other appearances of Lio should be at this link. The mentions of Agnes should be at this link. Essays with some mention of Viivi and Wagner will be at this link, although it’s a new tag, so who knows how long it’ll take for the next to appear? And other essays with Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal will be at this link when there’s any to mention.

Reading the Comics, 1 September 2018: Retirement Of A Tag Edition

I figure to do something rare, and retire one of my comic strip tags after today. Which strip am I going to do my best to drop from Reading the Comics posts? Given how many of the ones I read are short-lived comics that have been rerun three or four times since I started tracking them? Read on and see!

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 29th of August continues the sequence of Fi talking with kids about mathematics. My understanding was that she tried to give talks about why mathematics could be fun. That there are different ways to express the same number seems like a pretty fine-grain detail to get into. But this might lead into some bigger point. That there are several ways to describe the same thing can be surprising and unsettling to discover. That you have, when calculating, the option to switch between these ways freely can be liberating. But you have to know the option is there, and where to look for it. And how to see it’ll make something simpler.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 29th of August, 2018. What … what graphic does she have on-screen?

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 30th of August gets onto a thread about statistics. The point of statistics is to describe something complicated with something simple. So detail must be lost. That said, there are something like 2,038 different things called “average”. Each of them has a fair claim to the term, too. In Fi’s example here, 73 degrees (Fahrenheit) could be called the average as in the arithmetic mean, or average as in the median. The distribution reflects how far and how often the temperature is from 73. This would also be reflected in a quantity called the variance, or the standard deviation. Variance and standard deviation are different things, but they’re tied together; if you know one you know the other. It’s just sometimes one quantity is more convenient than the other to work with.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 30th of August, 2018. Somebody nag me sometime to tell the story about when I used Skylab’s torn-away meteorite shield for a heat-flow problem in a differential equations class. Thank you.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 1st of September has Fi argue that apparent irrelevance makes mathematics boring. It’s a common diagnosis. I think I’ve advanced the claim myself. I remember a 1980s probability textbook asking the chance that two transistors out of five had broken simultaneously. Surely in the earlier edition of the textbook, it was two vacuum tubes out of five. Five would be a reasonable (indeed, common) number of vacuum tubes to have in a radio. And it would be plausible that two might be broken at the same time.

Bill Holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 1st of September, 2018. Not to question Holbrook’s writing, since he somehow maintains three successful daily comic strips and may be presumed to know what he’s doing, but shouldn’t this have come before the strip from the 29th?

It seems obvious that wanting to know an answer makes it easier to do the work needed to find it. I’m curious whether that’s been demonstrated true. Like, it seems obvious that a reference to a thing someone doesn’t know anything about would make it harder to work on. But does it? Does it distract someone trying to work out the height of a ziggurat based on its distance and apparent angle, if all they know about a ziggurat is their surmise that it’s a thing whose height we might wish to know?

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am rerun for the 30th of August, 2018. It originally ran the 13th of January, 2000.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am rerun for the 30th of August is an old friend that’s been here a couple times. I suppose I do have to retire the strip from my Reading the Comics posts, at least, although I’m still amused enough by it to keep reading it daily. Simon Garfield’s On The Map, a book about the history of maps, notes that the X-marks-the-spot thing is an invention of the media. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island particularly. Stevenson’s treasure map, Garfield notes, had to be redrawn from the manuscript and the author’s notes. The original went missing in the mail to the publishers. I just mention because I think that adds a bit of wonder to the treasure map. And since, I guess, I won’t have the chance to mention this again.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 30th of August, 2018. Interesting to me is that either the panel comic by itself, or the Venn diagram by itself, would be a sufficient joke. The panel would be a cryptic one, one that probably attracted ‘I don’t get it’ responses, but it’d be decipherable. The Venn Diagram one would be fine, but wouldn’t have the tension and energy of the full strip.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 30th of August satisfies the need for a Venn Diagram joke this time around. It’s also the strange-geometry joke for the week. Klein bottles were originally described by Felix Klein. They exist in four (or more) dimensions, in much the way that M&oum;bius strips exist in three. And like the M&oum;bius strip the surface defies common sense. You can try to claim some spot on the surface is inside and some other spot outside. But you can get from your inside to your outside spot in a continuous path, one you might trace out on the surface without lifting your stylus.

If you were four-dimensional. Or more. If we were to see one in three dimensions we’d see a shape that intersects itself. As beings of only three spatial dimensions we have to pretend that doesn’t happen. It’s the same we we pretend a drawing of a cube shows six squares all of equal size and connected at right angles to one another, even though the drawing is nothing like that. The bottle-like shape Weinersmith draws is, I think, the most common representation of the Klein bottle. It looks like a fancy bottle, and you can buy one as a novelty gift for a mathematician. I don’t need one but do thank you for thinking of me. MathWorld shows another representation, a figure-eight-based one which looks to me like an advanced pasta noodle. But it doesn’t look anything like a bottle.

Eric the Circle for the 31st of August, 2018. … Shouldn’t this be with a right triangle?

Eric the Circle for the 31st of August, this one by JohnG, is a spot of wordplay. The pun here is the sine of an angle in a (right) triangle. That would be the length of the leg opposite the angle divided by the length of the hypotenuse. This is still stuff relevant to circles, though. One common interpretation of the cosine and sine of an angle is to look at the unit circle. That is, a circle with radius 1 and centered on the origin. Draw a line segment opening up an angle θ from the positive x-axis. Draw it counterclockwise. That is, if your angle is a very small number, you’re drawing a line segment that’s a little bit above the positive x-axis. Draw the line segment long enough that it touches the unit circle. That point where the line segment and the circle intersect? Look at its Cartesian coordinates. The y-coordinate will be the sine of θ. The x-coordinate will be the cosine of θ. The triangle you’re looking at has vertices at the origin; at x-coordinate cosine θ, y-coordinate 0; and at x-coordinate cosine θ, y-coordinate sine θ.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 1st of September, 2018. Somebody nag me sometime to save that last panel for my next What’s Going On In Mary Worth plot recap.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead for the 1st of September is its usual sort of nonsense, the kind that’s up my alley. It does spend two panels using arithmetic and algebra as signifiers of intelligence, or at least thoughtfulness.

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My other Reading the Comics posts should appear at this link. Other essays with On The Fastrack are at this link. The essays that mentioned Randolph Itch, 2 am, are at this link, and I suppose this will be the last of them. We’ll see if I do succeed in retiring the tag. Other appearances by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal are at this link. The strip comes up here a lot. Eric the Circle comics should be at this link. And other essays with Zippy the Pinhead mentions should be at this link. Thank you.

Reading the Comics, August 16, 2018: Recursive Edition

This edition of Reading the Comics can be found at this link.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th is a fractals joke. Benoit Mandelbrot became the centerpiece of the big fractals boom in pop mathematics in the 80s and 90s. This was thanks to a fascinating property of complex-valued numbers that he discovered and publicized. The Mandelbrot set is a collection of complex-valued numbers. It’s a border, properly, between two kinds of complex-valued numbers. This boundary has this fascinating shape that looks a bit like a couple kidney beans surrounded by lightning. That’s neat enough.

What’s amazing, and makes this joke anything, is what happens if you look closely at this boundary. Anywhere on it. In the bean shapes or in the lightning bolts. You find little replicas of the original shape. Not precisely the original shape. No two of these replicas are precisely identical (except for the “complex conjugate”, that is, something near the number has a mirror image near ). None of these look precisely like the original shape. But they look extremely close to one another. They’re smaller, yes, and rotated relative to the original, and to other copies. But go anywhere on this boundary and there it is: the original shape, including miniature imperfect copies, all over again.

Zach Weinersmith’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for the 14th of August, 2018. This by the way is an acceptable sketch of Mandelbrot, although at least in the picture Wikipedia has of him in 2010 the only thing that could be dubbed a mole looks more like just a shadow to me.

The Mandelbrot Set itself — well, there are a bunch of ways to think of it. One is in terms of something called the Julia Set, named for Gaston Julia. In 1918 he published a massive paper about the iteration of rational functions. That is, start with some domain and a function rule; what’s the range? Now if we used that range as the domain again, and used the same rule for the function, what’s the range of that range? If we use the range-of-that-range as the domain for the same function rule, what’s the range-of-the-range-of-the-range? The particular function here has one free parameter, a single complex-valued number. Depending on what it is, the range-of-the-range-of-the-range-etc becomes a set that’s either one big blob or a bunch of disconnected blobs. The Mandelbrot Set is the locus of parameters separating the one-big-blob from the many-disconnected-blob outcomes.

By the way, yes, Julia published this in 1918. The work was amazing. It was also forgotten. You can study this stuff analytically, but it’s hard. To visualize it you need to do incredible loads of computation. So this is why so much work lay fallow until the 1970s, when Mandelbrot could let computers do incredible loads of computation, and even draw some basic pictures.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 14th of August, 2018. I appreciate the one monkey in the first panel who thinks he’s on to something here.

Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens for the 14th is another instance of the monkeys-at-typewriters joke. I’ve written about this and the history of the monkeys-at-typewriters bit recently enough to feel comfortable pointing people there. It’s interesting that monkeys should have a connotation of reliably random typewriting, while cats would be reliably not doing something. But that’s a cultural image that’s a little too far from being mathematics for me to spend 800 words discussing.

Thom Bleumel’s Birdbrains for the 15th of August, 2018. I question the plausibility of none of these people tuning out the meeting to read their tablets instead.

Thom Bleumel’s Birdbrains for the 15th is a calendars joke. Numbers come into play since, well, it seems odd to try tracking large numbers of dates without some sense of arithmetic. Also, likely, without some sense of geometry. Calendars are much used to forecast coming events, such as New and Full Moons or the seasons. That takes basic understanding of how to locate things in the sky to do at all. It takes sophisticated understanding of how to locate things in the sky to do well.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 16th of August, 2018. Oh, these people would be at least as scandalized by a ÷ sign.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 16th is the first anthropomorphic-numerals joke around here in like three days. Certainly, the scandalous thing is supposed to be these numbers multiplying out in public where anyone might see them. I wonder if any part of the scandal should be that multiplication like this has to include three partners: the 4, the 7, and the x. In algebra we get used to a convention in which we do without the ‘x’. Just placing one term next to another carries an implicit multiplication: ‘4a’ for ‘4 times a’. But that convention fails disastrously with numerals; what should we make of ’47’? We might write 4(7), or maybe (4)(7), to be clear. Or we might put a little centered dot between the two, . The ‘x’ by that point is reserved for “some variable whose value isn’t specified”. And it would be weird to write ‘4 times x times 7’. It wouldn’t be wrong; it’d just look weird. It would suggest you were trying to emphasize a point. I’ve probably done it in one of my long derivation-happy posts.

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Other essays about comic strips are at this link. When I’ve talked about Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal I’ve tried to make sure it turns up at this link. Essays in which I’ve discussed Savage Chickens should be at this link. The times I’ve discussed Birdbrains should be at this link. And other essays describing The Argyle Sweater are at this link.