As I referenced on Sunday while there were a good number of comic strips mentioning mathematics last week, there weren’t many touching deeply enough for me to make real essays about them. But you may enjoy seeing the strips anyway. So here’s the first half of this roster.
Greg Cravens’s The Buckets for the 16th has Toby discovering a personal need for arithmetic. Accounting doesn’t get much praise from us mathematics majors, but it’s deserving of attention.
Carol Lay’s Lay Lines for the 16th feels to me like a narrative version of the liar’s paradox. On studying the story I’m not sure I can justify that. But it feels like it to me.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 17th has young Sarah Morgan not wanting to do the mathematics of counting days to Christmas. Or working out the number of days to Christmas. (And for those who don’t know, I regularly do recaps of the plot in Rex Morgan, M.D. on my other blog. I plan to get to this strip the first week in January, but the older essay will catch you up to October and it’s not like “family at Christmas” needs a lot of backstory even in the story strips.)
There were a half-dozen comic strips last week that mentioned mathematics but that I can’t make a paragraph about. Please let me give you a tour of them.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts rerun for the 22nd has Sally talk about how people who want children protected from books they won’t understand should save her from her mathematics book. It’s part of a storyline about what seems like a harmless book (The Six Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out) being banned. The strip originally ran the 24th of October, 1972.
Chris Browne’s Raising Duncan rerun for the 23rd has a man admitting bad mathematics skills for why he can’t count the ways he loves his wife. The strip originally ran the 27th of September, 2003. (The strip was short-lived, and is in perpetual reruns. It may be worth reading at least one time through, though, since the pairs of main characters in it are eagerly in love, without being sappy about it, and it’s pleasant seeing people enthusiastic about each other. This is the strip that had the exchange “Marry me!” “I did!” “Marry me more!” “Okay!” that keeps bringing me cheer and relationship goals.)
Each week Comic Strip Master Command sends out some comics that mention mathematics, but that aren’t substantial enough to write miniature essays about. This past week, too. Here are the comics that just mention mathematics. You may like them; there’s just not more to explain is all.
Brian Anderson’s Dog Eat Doug for the 27th uses “quantum entanglement equations” to represent deep thought on a complicated subject. Calculations are usually good for this.
Dan Collins’s Looks Good On Paper rerun for the 27th uses a blackboard of mathematics — geometry-related formulas — to stand in for all classwork. This strip also ran in 2017 and in 2015. I haven’t checked 2013. I know the strip is still in original production, as it’ll include strips referring to current events, so I’ll keep reading it a while yet.
Rick Detorie’s One Big Happy for the 27th mentions the “Old Math”, but going against Comic Strip Law, not as part of a crack about the New Math. This is just a simple age joke.
Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy Classics for the 29th, which originally ran the 23rd of November, 1949, is a basic cheating-in-class joke. It works for mathematics in a way it wouldn’t for, say, history. Mathematics has enough symbols that don’t appear in ordinary writing that you could copy them upside-down without knowing that you transcribe something meaningless. Well, not realizing an upside-down 4 isn’t anything is a bit odd, but anyone can get pretty lost in symbols.
Percy Crosby’s Skippy for the 30th originally ran the 4th of May, 1932. It’s one of those jokes subverting the form of a story problem, one about rates of completion.
I was away from home most of last week. Comic Strip Master Command was kind and acknowledged this. There wasn’t much for me to discuss. There’s not even many comics too slight to discuss. I thank them for their work in not overloading me. But if you wondered why Sunday’s post was what it was, you now know. I suspect you didn’t wonder.
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 29th of July is a comfortable and familiar face for these Reading the Comics posts. I’m glad to see it. The joke is built on negative numbers, and Wavehead’s right to say this is kind of the reason people hate mathematics. At least, that mathematicians will become comfortable with something that has a clear real-world intuitive meaning, such as that adding things together gets you a bigger thing. And then for good reasons of logic get to counter-intuitive things, such as adding things together to get a lesser thing. Negative numbers might be the first of these intuition-breaking things that people encounter. That or fractions. I encounter stories of people who refuse to accept that, say, is smaller than , although I’ve never seen it myself.
So why do mathematicians take stuff like “adding” and break it? Convenience, I suppose, is the important reason. Having negative numbers lets us treat “having a quantity” and “lacking a quantity” using the same mechanisms. So that’s nice to have. If we have positive and negative numbers, then we can treat “adding” and “subtracting” using the same mechanisms. That’s nice to do. The trouble is then knowing, like, “if -3 times 4 is greater than -16, is -3 times -4 greater than 16? Or less than? Why?”
Jeffrey Caulfield and Brian Ponshock’s Yaffle for the 31st of July uses the blackboard-full-of-mathematics as shorthand for deep thought about topics. The equations don’t mean much of anything, individually or collectively. I’m curious whether Caulfield and Ponshock mean, in the middle there, for that equation to be π times y2 equalling z3, or whether it’s π times x times y2 that is. Doens’t matter either way. It’s just decoration.
And then there are the most marginal comic strips for the week. And if that first Yaffle didn’t count as too marginal to mention, think what that means for the others. Yaffle on the 28th of July features a mention of sudoku as the sort of thing one struggles to solve. Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein’s Daddy’s Home for the 1st of August mentions mathematics as the sort of homework a parent can’t help with. Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon for the 2nd sets up a math contest. It’s mentioned as the sort of things the comic strip’s regular cast can’t hope to do.
These days I’ve been preparing these comics posts by making a note of every comic that seems like it might have a mathematical topic. Then at the end of the week I go back and re-read them all and think what I could write something about. This past week’s had two that seemed like nice juicy topics. And then I was busy all day Saturday so didn’t have time to put the thought into them that they needed. So instead I offer some comic strips with at least mentions of mathematical subjects. If they’re not tightly on point, well, I need to post something, don’t I?
Jeffrey Caulfield and Brian Ponshock’s Yaffle for the 24th is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. It did get me thinking about the numbers which (in English) are homophones to other words. There don’t seem to be many, though: one, two, four, six, and eight seem to be about all I could really justify. There’s probably dialects where “ten” and “tin” blend together. There’s probably a good Internet Argument to be had about whether “couple” should be considered the name of a number. That there aren’t more is probably that there, in a sense, only a couple of names for numbers, with a scheme to compound names for a particular number of interest.
Scott Hilburn’s The Argyle Sweater for the 25th mentions algebra, but is mostly aimed at the Reading the Comics for some historian blogger. I kind of admire Hilburn’s willingness to go for the 70-year-old scandal for a day’s strip. But a daily strip demands a lot of content, especially when it doesn’t have recurring characters. The quiz answers as given are correct, and that’s easy to check. But it is typically easy to check whether a putative answer is correct. Finding an answer is the hard part.
I’m not aware of any etymological link between the term algebra and the name Alger. The word “algebra” derivate from the Arabic “al-jabr”, which the Oxford English Dictionary tells me literally derives from a term for “the surgical treatment of fractures”. Less literally, it would mean putting things back together, restoring the missing parts. We get it from a textbook by the 9th century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose last name Europeans mutated into “algorithm”, as in, the way to solve a problem. That’s thanks to his book again. “Alger” as in a name seems to trace to Old English, although exactly where is debatable, as it usually is. (I’m assuming ‘Alger’ as a first name derives from its uses as a family name, and will angrily accept correction from people who know better.)
Daniel Shelton’s Ben for the 25th has a four-year-old offering his fingers as a way to help his older brother with mathematics work. Counting on fingers can be a fine way to get the hang of arithmetic and at least I won’t fault someone for starting there. Eventually, do enough arithmetic, and you stop matching numbers with fingers because that adds an extra layer of work that doesn’t do anything but slow you down.
Catching my interest though is that Nicholas (the eight-year-old, and I had to look that up on the Ben comic strip web site; GoComics doesn’t have a cast list) had worked out 8 + 6, but was struggling with 7 + 8. He might at some point get experienced enough to realize that 7 + 8 has to be the same thing as 8 + 7, which has to be the same thing as 8 + 6 + 1. And if he’s already got 8 + 6 nailed down, then 7 + 8 is easy. But that takes using a couple of mathematical principles — that addition commutes, that you can substitute one quantity with something equal to it, that you addition associates — and he might not see where those principles get him any advantage over some other process.
Ed Allison’s Unstrange Phenomena for the 25th builds its Dadaist nonsense for the week around repeating numbers. I learn from trying to pin down just what Allison means by “repeating numbers” that there are people who ascribe mystical significance to, say, “444”. Well, if that helps you take care of the things you need to do, all right. Repeating decimals are a common enough thing. They appear in the decimal expressions for rational numbers. These expressions either terminate — they have finitely many digits and then go to an infinitely long sequence of 0’s — or they repeat. (We rule out “repeating nothing but zeroes” because … I don’t know. I would guess it makes the proofs in some corner of number theory less bothersome.)
You could also find interesting properties about numbers made up of repeating strings of numerals. For example, write down any number of 9’s you like, followed by a 6. The number that creates is divisible by 6. I grant this might not be the most important theorem you’ll ever encounter, but it’s a neat one. Like, a strong of 4’s followed by a 9 is not necessarily divisible by 4 or 9. There are bunches of cute little theorem like this, mostly good for making one admit that huh, there’s some neat coincidences(?) about numbers.
Although … Allison’s strip does seem to get at seeing particular numbers over and over. This does happen; it’s probably a cultural thing. One of the uses we put numbers to is indexing things. So, for example, a TV channel gets a number and while the station may have a name, it makes for an easier control to set the TV to channel numbered 5 or whatnot. We also use numbers to measure things. When we do, we get to pick the size of our units. We typically pick them so our measurements don’t have to be numbers too big or too tiny. There’s no reason we couldn’t measure the distance between cities in millimeters, or the length of toes in light-years. But to try is to look like you’re telling a joke. So we get see some ranges — 1 to 5, 1 to 10 — used a lot when we don’t need fine precision. We see, like, 1 to 100 for cases where we need more precision than that but don’t have to pin a thing down to, like, a quarter of a percent. Numbers will spill past these bounds, naturally. But we are more likely to encounter a 20 than a 15,642. We set up how we think about numbers so we are. So maybe it would look like some numbers just follow you.
This installment took longer to write than you’d figure, because it’s the time of year we’re watching a lot of mostly Rankin/Bass Christmas specials around here. So I have to squeeze words out in-between baffling moments of animation and, like, arguing whether there’s any possibility that Jack Frost was not meant to be a Groundhog Day special that got rewritten to Christmas because the networks weren’t having it otherwise.
Jeffrey Caulfield and Brian Ponshock’s Yaffle for the 3rd is the anthropomorphic numerals joke for the week. … You know, I’ve always wondered in this sort of setting, what are two-digit numbers like? I mean, what’s the difference between a twelve and a one-and-two just standing near one another? How do people recognize a solitary number? This is a darned silly thing to wonder so there’s probably a good web comic about it.
John Hambrock’s The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee for the 4th has Edison forecast the outcome of a basketball game. I can’t imagine anyone really believing in forecasting the outcome, though. The elements of forecasting a sporting event are plausible enough. We can suppose a game to be a string of events. Each of them has possible outcomes. Some of them score points. Some block the other team’s score. Some cause control of the ball (or whatever makes scoring possible) to change teams. Some take a player out, for a while or for the rest of the game. So it’s possible to run through a simulated game. If you know well enough how the people playing do various things? How they’re likely to respond to different states of things? You could certainly simulate that.
But all sorts of crazy things will happen, one game or another. Run the same simulation again, with different random numbers. The final score will likely be different. The course of action certainly will. Run the same simulation many times over. Vary it a little; what happens if the best player is a little worse than average? A little better? What if the referees make a lot of mistakes? What if the weather affects the outcome? What if the weather is a little different? So each possible outcome of the sporting event has some chance. We have a distribution of the possible results. We can judge an expected value, and what the range of likely outcomes is. This demands a lot of data about the players, though. Edison Lee can have it, I suppose. The premise of the strip is that he’s a genius of unlimited competence. It would be more likely to expect for college and professional teams.
Brian Basset’s Red and Rover for the 4th uses arithmetic as the homework to get torn up. I’m not sure it’s just a cameo appearance. It makes a difference to the joke as told that there’s division and long division, after all. But it could really be any subject.
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