## Reading the Comics, August 9, 2019: Venn Diagrams Edition

Thanks for sticking around as I finally got to the past week’s comic strips. There were just enough for me to divide them into two chunks and not feel like I’m cheating anyone of my sparkling prose.

Sandra Bell-Lundy’s Between Friends for the 4th is another entry in this strip’s string of not-quite-Venn-Diagram jokes. As will happen, the point of the diagram seems clear enough even if it doesn’t quite parse. And it isn’t a proper Venn diagram, of course; a Venn diagram for five propositions has to have 31 regions, representing all the possible ways five things can combine or be excluded. They can be beautiful to look at, but start losing their value as ways to organize thought. This is again a Euclid diagram, which doesn’t need to show every possible overlap.

Michael Jantze’s The Norm 4.0 for the 5th is the other Venn Diagram joke for the week. Again properly the first one, showing the complete lack of overlap between two positions, is an Euler rather than a Venn diagram. The second, the “Amity Venn diagram on planet X”, is a Venn diagram and showing the intersection of blue and yellow regions as green is a nice way to show that. (I’m not fond of the gender stereotyping here, nor of the conflation of gender and chromosomes. But the comic strip does have to rely on shorthands or there’s just not going to be the space to compose a joke.)

Harry Bliss’s Bliss for the 6th name-checks tetrahedrons. These are the shapes the rest of us would probably call pyramids or perhaps d4. It’s a bit silly to suppose a hairball should be a tetrahedron. But natural processes will form particular shapes. The obvious example is the hexagonal prisms of honeycombs, which come about for reasons … I’m not sure biologists are completely agreed on. Hexagons do seem to be efficient ways to encompass a lot of volume with a minimum of material, at least. But even the classic hairball looks like that for reasons, related to how it’s created and how it’s expelled from the cat. They just don’t usually have corners.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 9th has you common blackboard full of symbols to represent mathematical work. It also evokes a well-worn joke that defines a mathematician as a mechanism for turning coffee into theorems. The explosion of creativity though is true to mathematicians, though. When inspiration is flowing the notes will get abundant and start going in many different wild directions. The symbols in the comic strip don’t mean anything. But that’s not inauthentic. The notes written during an inspired burst will be nonsensical. The great idea needs to be preserved. It can be cleaned up and, one hopes, made presentable later.

This and other Reading the Comics posts are at this link. I should have a fresh one on Thursday, wrapping up the past week.

## Reading the Comics, May 31, 2017: Feast Week Edition

You know we’re getting near the end of the (United States) school year when Comic Strip Master Command orders everyone to clear out their mathematics jokes. I’m assuming that’s what happened here. Or else a lot of cartoonists had word problems on their minds eight weeks ago. Also eight weeks ago plus whenever they originally drew the comics, for those that are deep in reruns. It was busy enough to split this week’s load into two pieces and might have been worth splitting into three, if I thought I had publishing dates free for all that.

Larry Wright’s Motley Classics for the 28th of May, a rerun from 1989, is a joke about using algebra. Occasionally mathematicians try to use the the ability of people to catch things in midair as evidence of the sorts of differential equations solution that we all can do, if imperfectly, in our heads. But I’m not aware of evidence that anyone does anything that sophisticated. I would be stunned if we didn’t really work by a process of making a guess of where the thing should be and refining it as time allows, with experience helping us make better guesses. There’s good stuff to learn in modeling how to catch stuff, though.

Also I want to say some very good words about Jantze’s graphical design. The mock textbook cover for the title panel on the left is so spot-on for a particular era in mathematics textbooks it’s uncanny. The all-caps Helvetica, the use of two slightly different tans, the minimalist cover art … I know shelves stuffed full in the university mathematics library where every book looks like that. Plus, “[Mathematics Thing] And Their Applications” is one of the roughly four standard approved mathematics book titles. He paid good attention to his references.

Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich’s Real Life Adventures for the 28th deploys a big old whiteboard full of equations for the “secret” of the universe. This makes a neat change from finding the “meaning” of the universe, or of life. The equations themselves look mostly like gibberish to me, but Wise and Aldrich make good uses of their symbols. The symbol $\vec{B}$, a vector-valued quantity named B, turns up a lot. This symbol we often use to represent magnetic flux. The B without a little arrow above it would represent the intensity of the magnetic field. Similarly an $\vec{H}$ turns up. This we often use for magnetic field strength. While I didn’t spot a $\vec{E}$ — electric field — which would be the natural partner to all this, there are plenty of bare E symbols. Those would represent electric potential. And many of the other symbols are what would naturally turn up if you were trying to model how something is tossed around by a magnetic field. Q, for example, is often the electric charge. ω is a common symbol for how fast an electromagnetic wave oscillates. (It’s not the frequency, but it’s related to the frequency.) The uses of symbols is consistent enough, in fact, I wonder if Wise and Aldrich did use a legitimate sprawl of equations and I’m missing the referenced problem.

John Graziano’s Ripley’s Believe It Or Not for the 28th mentions how many symbols are needed to write out the numbers from 1 to 100. Is this properly mathematics? … Oh, who knows. It’s just neat to know.

Mark O’Hare’s Citizen Dog rerun for the 29th has the dog Fergus struggle against a word problem. Ordinary setup and everything, but I love the way O’Hare draws Fergus in that outfit and thinking hard.

The Eric the Circle rerun for the 29th by ACE10203040 is a mistimed Pi Day joke.

Bill Amend’s FoxTrot Classicfor the 31st, a rerun from the 7th of June, 2006, shows the conflation of “genius” and “good at mathematics” in everyday use. Amend has picked a quixotic but in-character thing for Jason Fox to try doing. Euclid’s Fifth Postulate is one of the classic obsessions of mathematicians throughout history. Euclid admitted the thing — a confusing-reading mess of propositions — as a postulate because … well, there’s interesting geometry you can’t do without it, and there doesn’t seem any way to prove it from the rest of his geometric postulates. So it must be assumed to be true.

There isn’t a way to prove it from the rest of the geometric postulates, but it took mathematicians over two thousand years of work at that to be convinced of the fact. But I know I went through a time of wanting to try finding a proof myself. It was a mercifully short-lived time that ended in my humbly understanding that as smart as I figured I was, I wasn’t that smart. We can suppose Euclid’s Fifth Postulate to be false and get interesting geometries out of that, particularly the geometries of the surface of the sphere, and the geometry of general relativity. Jason will surely sometime learn.