## Reading the Comics, December 10, 2016: E = mc^2 Edition

And now I can finish off last week’s mathematically-themed comic strips. There’s a strong theme to them, for a refreshing change. It would almost be what we’d call a Comics Synchronicity, on Usenet group rec.arts.comics.strips, had they all appeared the same day. Some folks claiming to be open-minded would allow a Synchronicity for strips appearing on subsequent days or close enough in publication, but I won’t have any of that unless it suits my needs at the time.

Ernie Bushmiller’s for the 6th would fit thematically better as a Cameo Edition comic. It mentions arithmetic but only because it’s the sort of thing a student might need a cheat sheet on. I can’t fault Sluggo needing help on adding eight or multiplying by six; they’re hard. Not remembering 4 x 2 is unusual. But everybody has their own hangups. The strip originally ran the 6th of December, 1949.

Bill holbrook’s On The Fastrack for the 7th seems like it should be the anthropomorphic numerals joke for this essay. It doesn’t seem to quite fit the definition, but, what the heck.

Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk’s The Chuckle Brothers on the 7th starts off the run of E = mc2 jokes for this essay. This one reminds me of Gary Larson’s Far Side classic with the cleaning woman giving Einstein just that little last bit of inspiration about squaring things away. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that E equalling m times c squared isn’t a matter of what makes an attractive-looking formula. There’s good reasons when one thinks what energy and mass are to realize they’re connected like that. Einstein’s famous, deservedly, for recognizing that link and making it clear.

Mark Pett’s Lucky Cow rerun for the 7th has Claire try to use Einstein’s famous quote to look like a genius. The mathematical content is accidental. It could be anything profound yet easy to express, and it’s hard to beat the economy of “E = mc2” for both. I’d agree that it suggests Claire doesn’t know statistics well to suppose she could get a MacArthur “Genius” Grant by being overheard by a grant nominator. On the other hand, does anybody have a better idea how to get their attention?

Harley Schwadron’s 9 to 5 for the 8th completes the “E = mc2” triptych. Calling a tie with the equation on it a power tie elevates the gag for me. I don’t think of “E = mc2” as something that uses powers, even though it literally does. I suppose what gets me is that “c” is a constant number. It’s the speed of light in a vacuum. So “c2” is also a constant number. In form the equation isn’t different from “E = m times seven”, and nobody thinks of seven as a power.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals rerun for the 8th is a bit of mathematics wordplay. It’s also got that weird Morrie Turner thing going on where it feels unquestionably earnest and well-intentioned but prejudiced in that way smart 60s comedies would be.

Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey for the 18th of May, 1960 was reprinted on the 9th. It mentions mathematics — algebra specifically — as the sort of thing intelligent people do. I’m going to take a leap and suppose it’s the sort of algebra done in high school about finding values of ‘x’ rather than the mathematics-major sort of algebra, done with groups and rings and fields. I wonder when holding a mop became the signifier of not just low intelligence but low ambition. It’s subverted in Jef Mallet’s Frazz, the title character of which works as a janitor to support his exercise and music habits. But it is a standard prop to signal something.

## Reading the Comics, December 3, 2016: Cute Little Jokes Edition

Comic Strip Master Command apparently wanted me to have a bunch of easy little pieces that don’t inspire rambling essays. Message received!

Mark Litzler’s Joe Vanilla for the 27th is a wordplay joke in which any mathematical content is incidental. It could be anything put in a positive light; numbers are just easy things to arrange so. From the prominent appearance of ‘3’ and ‘4’ I supposed Litzler was using the digits of π, but if he is, it’s from some part of π that I don’t recognize. (That would be any part after the seventeenth digit. I’m not obsessive about π digits.)

Samson’s Dark Side Of The Horse is whatever the equivalent of punning is for Roman Numerals. I like Horace blushing.

John Deering’s Strange Brew for the 28th is a paint-by-numbers joke, and one I don’t see done often. And there is beauty in the appearance of mathematics. It’s not appreciated enough. I think looking at the tables of integral formulas on the inside back cover of a calculus book should prove the point, though. All those rows of integral signs and sprawls of symbols after show this abstract beauty. I’ve surely mentioned the time when the creative-arts editor for my undergraduate leftist weekly paper asked for a page of mathematics or physics work to include as an picture, too. I used the problem that inspired my “Why Stuff Can Orbit” sequence over on my mathematics blog. The editor loved the look of it all, even if he didn’t know what most of it meant.

Niklas Eriksson’s Carpe Diem for the 29th is a joke about life, I suppose. It uses a sprawled blackboard full of symbols to play the part of the proof. It’s gibberish, of course, although I notice how many mathematics cliches get smooshed into it. There’s a 3.1451 — I assume that’s a garbed digits of π — under a square root sign. There’s an “E = mc”, I suppose a garbled bit of Einstein’s Famous Equation in there. There’s a “cos 360”. 360 evokes the number of degrees in a circle, but mathematicians don’t tend to use degrees. There’s analytic reasons why we find it nicer to use radians, for which the equivalent would be “cos 2π”. If we wrote that at all, since the cosine of 2π is one of the few cosines everyone knows. Every mathematician knows. It’s 1. Well, maybe the work just got to that point and it hasn’t been cleaned up.

Eriksson’s Carpe Diem reappears the 30th, with a few blackboards with less mathematics to suggest someone having a creative block. It does happen to us all. My experience is mathematicians don’t tend to say “Eureka” when we do get a good idea, though. It’s more often some vague mutterings and “well what if” while we form the idea. And then giggling or even laughing once we’re sure we’ve got something. This may be just me and my friends. But it is a real rush when we have it.

Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper for the 29t tells the Möbius strip joke. It’s a well-rendered one, though; I like that there is a readable strip in there and that it’s distorted to fit the geometry.

Henry Scarpelli and Craig Boldman’s Archie rerun for the 2nd of December tosses off the old gag about not needing mathematics now that we have calculators. It’s not a strip about that, and that’s fine.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons finally appeared the 2nd. It’s a resistant-student joke. And a bit of wordplay.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix from the 2nd featured an installment of Tautological But True. One might point out they’re using “average” here to mean “arithmetic mean”. There probably isn’t enough egg salad consumed to let everyone have a median-sized serving. And I wouldn’t make any guesses about the geometric mean serving. But the default meaning of “average” is the arithmetic mean. Anyone using one of the other averages would say so ahead of time or else is trying to pull something.

## Reading the Comics, October 29, 2016: Rerun Comics Edition

There were a couple of rerun comics in this week’s roundup, so I’ll go with that theme. And I’ll put in one more appeal for subjects for my End of 2016 Mathematics A To Z. Have a mathematics term you’d like to see me go on about? Just ask! Much of the alphabet is still available.

John Kovaleski’s Bo Nanas rerun the 24th is about probability. There’s something wondrous and strange that happens when we talk about the probability of things like birth days. They are, if they’re in the past, determined and fixed things. The current day is also a known, determined, fixed thing. But we do mean something when we say there’s a 1-in-365 (or 366, or 365.25 if you like) chance of today being your birthday. It seems to me this is probability based on ignorance. If you don’t know when my birthday is then your best guess is to suppose there’s a one-in-365 (or so) chance that it’s today. But I know when my birthday is; to me, with this information, the chance today is my birthday is either 0 or 1. But what are the chances that today is a day when the chance it’s my birthday is 1? At this point I realize I need much more training in the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of probability. If someone is aware of a good introductory book about it, or a web site or blog that goes into these problems in a way a lay reader will understand, I’d love to hear of it.

I’ve featured this installment of Poor Richard’s Almanac before. I’ll surely feature it again. I like Richard Thompson’s sense of humor. The first panel mentions non-Euclidean geometry, using the connotation that it does have. Non-Euclidean geometries are treated as these magic things — more, these sinister magic things — that defy all reason. They can’t defy reason, of course. And at least some of them are even sensible if we imagine we’re drawing things on the surface of the Earth, or at least the surface of a balloon. (There are non-Euclidean geometries that don’t look like surfaces of spheres.) They don’t work exactly like the geometry of stuff we draw on paper, or the way we fit things in rooms. But they’re not magic, not most of them.

Stephen Bentley’s Herb and Jamaal for the 25th I believe is a rerun. I admit I’m not certain, but it feels like one. (Bentley runs a lot of unannounced reruns.) Anyway I’m refreshed to see a teacher giving a student permission to count on fingers if that’s what she needs to work out the problem. Sometimes we have to fall back on the non-elegant ways to get comfortable with a method.

Dave Whamond’s Reality Check for the 25th name-drops Einstein and one of the three equations that has any pop-culture currency.

Guy Gilchrist’s Today’s Dogg for the 27th is your basic mathematical-symbols joke. We need a certain number of these.

Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County for the 28th is another rerun, from 1981. And it’s been featured here before too. As mentioned then, Milo is using calculus and logarithms correctly in his rather needless insult of Freida. 10,000 is a constant number, and as mentioned a few weeks back its derivative must be zero. Ten to the power of zero is 1. The log of 10, if we’re using logarithms base ten, is also 1. There are many kinds of logarithms but back in 1981, the default if someone said “log” would be the logarithm base ten. Today the default is more muddled; a normal person would mean the base-ten logarithm by “log”. A mathematician might mean the natural logarithm, base ‘e’, by “log”. But why would a normal person mention logarithms at all anymore?

Jef Mallett’s Frazz for the 28th is mostly a bit of wordplay on evens and odds. It’s marginal, but I do want to point out some comics that aren’t reruns in this batch.

## Reading the Comics, March 19, 2016: I Do Some Calculus Edition

It’s been a normal cluster of mathematically-themed jokes this past week. But one of them lets me show off my ability to do introductory calculus.

Norm Feuti’s Gil for the 15th of March is a resisting-the-word-problems joke. It’s also a rerun, sad to say. King Features syndicated Feuti’s strip for a couple of years, but couldn’t make a go of it. GoComics.com is reprinting what ran and that’s something, at least.

Justin Boyd’s Invisible Bread for the 16th plays on alarm clocks that make you solve problems. I’ve heard of these things, and I suppose they exist or something. The idea is that making you do a bit of arithmetic proves you’ve gotten up enough to not fall right back asleep. The clockmakers are underestimating my ability to get back to sleep. Anyway, I like the escalation of this.

The integral that has to be solved, $\int_0^{\infty} \left(1 + 2x\right)e^{-x} dx$, is a good problem for people taking their first calculus course. Let me spoil it as a homework problem by saying how I’d solve it. If you haven’t got the first idea what calculus is about and don’t wish to know, go ahead and skip to the bit about Rudy Park. Or just enjoy the parts of the sentences below that aren’t mathematics.

The first thing I notice is the integrand, the thing inside the integral. That’s $\left(1 + 2x\right)e^{-x}$, which is the same as $e^{-x} + 2xe^{-x}$. Distributive law, as if you didn’t know. That strikes me as worth doing because, if the integral converges, the integral of the sum of two things is the same as the sum of the integral of two things. I’m willing to suppose it converges until given evidence otherwise. So this integral is the same as $\int_{0}^{\infty} e^{-x} dx + \int_{0}^{\infty} 2xe^{-x} dx$.

I think that’s worth doing because that first integral is incredibly easy. It’ll be a number equal to whatever -e-x is, when x is infinitely large, minus what -e-x is when x is zero. When x is infinitely large, -e-x is zero. When x is 0, -e-x is -1. So 0 minus -1 is … 1.

$\int_{0}^{\infty} 2xe^{-x} dx$ is harder. But it suggests how to evaluate it. The integrand is the quantity 2x times the quantity e-x. 2x is easy to take the derivative of. e-x is easy to integrate. (It’s also easy to take the derivative of, but it’s easier to integrate.) This suggests trying out integration by parts.

When you integrate by parts, you notice the original integral is the product of a part that’s easy to differentiate and a part that’s easy to integrate. My Intro Calculus textbooks generically label the easy-to-differentiate part u, and the easy-to-integrate part dv. Then the derivatie of the easy-to-differentiate part is du, and the integral of the easy-to-integrate part is v. When you integrate by parts, the integral of u times dv turns out to be equal to u times v (no integral signs there) minus the integral of v du. This may sound like we’ve just turned one integral into another. So we have. But we’ve often made it into an easier integral to evaluate. This is why we ever try it.

So if u equals 2x, then its derivative du is equal to 2 dx. If dv is equal to e-xdx (we want to carry those little d’s along), then v is equal to -e-x. And this means we have this:

$\int_{0}^{\infty} 2xe^{-x} dx = -2xe^{-x}|_{0}^{\infty} - \int_{0}^{\infty} -2e^{-x} dx$.

That middle part, $-2xe^{-x}|_{0}^{\infty}$, is not an integral. It’s been integrated. The notation there means to evaluate the thing when x is infinitely large, and evaluate the thing when x is zero. Then subtract the x-is-zero value from the x-is-infinitely-large value. The x-is-zero value of this expression turns out to be zero, as you realize when you start writing “2 times 0 times oh wait we’re done here”. The x-is-infinitely-large value of this expression takes longer to get done. If you want to do it right you have to invoke l’Hôpital’s Rule. But it’s also zero.

The right-hand part, $- \int_{0}^{\infty} -2e^{-x} dx$, is equal to $\int_{0}^{\infty} 2e^{-x} dx$, and that’s equal to $-2 e^{-x}|_{0}^{\infty}$. Which will be 0 minus a -2. Or 2 altogether.

So the integral is 1 plus 2, or in total, 3. The strip got its integration right.

Darrin Bell and Theron Heir’s Rudy Park for the 16th speaks of some architect who said the job didn’t demand being good at mathematics. I hadn’t heard the original claim and didn’t feel my constitution up to finding it. It was hard enough reading the comments at GoComics.com.

Ruben Bolling’s Super-Fun-Pak Comix for the 17th has found a weakness in my policy of “we’ve maybe done enough Chaos Butterfly and Schrödinger’s Cat mantions”.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 18th mentions circle and radius and that’s all Mark Anderson needs to get my publicity.

David L Hoyt and Jeff Knurek’s Jumble for the 18th has an arithmetic theme. Note the quote marks in the final answer. They’re a warning that the punch line is a pun or wordplay.

## Reading the Comics, March 14, 2016: Pi Day Comics Event

Comic Strip Master Command had the regular pace of mathematically-themed comic strips the last few days. But it remembered what the 14th would be. You’ll see that when we get there.

Ray Billingsley’s Curtis for the 11th of March is a student-resists-the-word-problem joke. But it’s a more interesting word problem than usual. It’s your classic problem of two trains meeting, but rather than ask when they’ll meet it asks where. It’s just an extra little step once the time of meeting is made, but that’s all right by me. Anything to freshen the scenario up.

Tony Carrillo’s F Minus for the 11th was apparently our Venn Diagram joke for the week. I’m amused.

Mason Mastroianni, Mick Mastroianni, and Perri Hart’s B.C. for the 12th of March name-drops statisticians. Statisticians are almost expected to produce interesting pictures of their results. It is the field that gave us bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, and many more. Statistics is, in part, about understanding a complicated set of data with a few numbers. It’s also about turning those numbers into recognizable pictures, all in the hope of finding meaning in a confusing world (ours).

Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug for the 13th of March uses walls full of mathematical scrawl as signifier for “stuff thought deeply about’. I don’t recognize any of the symbols specifically, although some of them look plausibly like calculus. I would not be surprised if Anderson had copied equations from a book on string theory. I’d do it to tell this joke.

And then came the 14th of March. That gave us a bounty of Pi Day comics. Among them:

John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee trusts that the name of the day is wordplay enough.

Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater is also a wordplay joke, although it’s a bit more advanced.

Tim Rickard’s Brewster Rockit fuses the pun with one of its running, or at least rolling, gags.

Bill Whitehead’s Free Range makes an urban legend out of the obsessive calculation of digits of π.

And Missy Meyer’s informational panel cartoon Holiday Doodles mentions that besides “National” Pi Day it was also “National” Potato Chip Day, “National” Children’s Craft Day, and “International” Ask A Question Day. My question: for the first three days, which nation?

Edited To Add: And I forgot to mention, after noting to myself that I ought to mention it. The Price Is Right (the United States edition) hopped onto the Pi Day fuss. It used the day as a thematic link for its Showcase prize packages, noting how you could work out π from the circumference of your new bicycles, or how π was a letter from your vacation destination of Greece, and if you think there weren’t brand-new cars in both Showcases you don’t know the game show well. Did anyone learn anything mathematical from this? I am skeptical. Do people come away thinking mathematics is more fun after this? … Conceivably. At least it was a day fairly free of people declaring they Hate Math and Can Never Do It.

## Reading the Comics, June 25, 2015: Not Making A Habit Of This Edition

I admit I did this recently, and am doing it again. But I don’t mean to make it a habit. I ran across a few comic strips that I can’t, even with a stretch, call mathematically-themed, but I liked them too much to ignore them either. So they’re at the end of this post. I really don’t intend to make this a regular thing in Reading the Comics posts.

Justin Boyd’s engagingly silly Invisible Bread (June 22) names the tuning “two steps below A”. He dubs this “negative C#”. This is probably an even funnier joke if you know music theory. The repetition of the notes in a musical scale could be used as an example of cyclic or modular arithmetic. Really, that the note above G is A of the next higher octave, and the note below A is G of the next lower octave, probably explains the idea already.

If we felt like, we could match the notes of a scale to the counting numbers. Match A to 0, B to 1, C to 2 and so on. Work out sharps and flats as you like. Then we could think of transposing a note from one key to another as adding or subtracting numbers. (Warning: do not try to pass your music theory class using this information! Transposition of keys is a much more subtle process than I am describing.) If the number gets above some maximum, it wraps back around to 0; if the number would go below zero, it wraps back around to that maximum. Relabeling the things in a group might make them easier or harder to understand. But it doesn’t change the way the things relate to one another. And that’s why we might call something F or negative C#, as we like and as we hope to be understood.

Hilary Price’s Rhymes With Orange (June 23) reminds us how important it is to pick the correct piece of chalk. The mathematical symbols on the board don’t mean anything. A couple of the odder bits of notation might be meant as shorthand. Often in the rush of working out a problem some of the details will get written as borderline nonsense. The mathematician is probably more interested in getting the insight down. She’ll leave the details for later reflection.

Jason Poland’s Robbie and Bobby (June 23) uses “calculating obscure digits of pi” as computer fun. Calculating digits of pi is hard, at least in decimals, which is all anyone cares about. If you wish to know the 5,673,299,925th decimal digit of pi, you need to work out all 5,673,299,924 digits that go before it. There are formulas to work out a binary (or hexadecimal) digit of pi without working out all the digits that go before. This saves quite some time if you need to explore the nether-realms of pi’s digits.

The comic strip also uses Stephen Hawking as the icon for most-incredibly-smart-person. It’s the role that Albert Einstein used to have, and still shares. I am curious whether Hawking is going to permanently displace Einstein as the go-to reference for incredible brilliance. His pop culture celebrity might be a transient thing. I suspect it’s going to last, though. Hawking’s life has a tortured-genius edge to it that gives it Romantic appeal, likely to stay popular.

Paul Trap’s Thatababy (June 23) presents confusing brand-new letters and numbers. Letters are obviously human inventions though. They’ve been added to and removed from alphabets for thousands of years. It’s only a few centuries since “i” and “j” became (in English) understood as separate letters. They had been seen as different ways of writing the same letter, or the vowel and consonant forms of the same letter. If enough people found a proposed letter useful it would work its way into the alphabet. Occasionally the ampersand & has come near being a letter. (The ampersand has a fascinating history. Honestly.) And conversely, if we collectively found cause to toss one aside we could remove it from the alphabet. English hasn’t lost any letters since yogh (the Old English letter that looks like a 3 written half a line off) was dropped in favor of “gh”, about five centuries ago, but there’s no reason that it couldn’t shed another.

Numbers are less obviously human inventions. But the numbers we use are, or at least work like they are. Arabic numerals are barely eight centuries old in Western European use. Their introduction was controversial. People feared shopkeepers and moneylenders could easily cheat people unfamiliar with these crazy new symbols. Decimals, instead of fractions, were similarly suspect. Negative numbers took centuries to understand and to accept as numbers. Irrational numbers too. Imaginary numbers also. Indeed, look at the connotations of those names: negative numbers. Irrational numbers. Imaginary numbers. We can add complex numbers to that roster. Each name at least sounds suspicious of the innovation.

There are more kinds of numbers. In the 19th century William Rowan Hamilton developed quaternions. These are 4-tuples of numbers that work kind of like complex numbers. They’re strange creatures, admittedly, not very popular these days. Their greatest strength is in representing rotations in three-dimensional space well. There are also octonions, 8-tuples of numbers. They’re more exotic than quaternions and have fewer good uses. We might find more, in time.

Rina Piccolo’s entry in Six Chix this week (June 24) draws a house with extra dimensions. An extra dimension is a great way to add volume, or hypervolume, to a place. A cube that’s 20 feet on a side has a volume of 203 or 8,000 cubic feet, after all. A four-dimensional hypercube 20 feet on each side has a hypervolume of 160,000 hybercubic feet. This seems like it should be enough for people who don’t collect books.

Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals (June 24, rerun) is just a bit of wordplay. It’s built on the idea kids might not understand the difference between the words “ratio” and “racial”.

Tom Toles’s Randolph Itch, 2 am (June 25, rerun) inspires me to wonder if anybody’s ever sold novelty 4-D glasses. Probably they have, sometime.

Now for the comics that I just can’t really make mathematics but that I like anyway:

Phil Dunlap’s Ink Pen (June 23, rerun) is aimed at the folks still lingering in grad school. Please be advised that most doctoral theses do not, in fact, end in supervillainy.

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy (June 25, rerun) tickles me. But Albert Einstein did after all say many things in his life, and not everything was as punchy as that line about God and dice.