Reading the Comics, April 25, 2020: Off Brand Edition

Comic Strip Master Command decided I should have a week to catch up on things, and maybe force me to write something original. Of all the things I read there were only four strips that had some mathematics content. And three of them are such glancing mentions that I don’t feel it proper to include the strip. So let me take care of this.

Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 20th is the Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the week. Wavehead apparently wants to know whether \frac{3}{4} or \frac{6}{8} is the better of these equivalent forms. I understand the impulse. Rarely in real life do we see two things that are truly equivalent; there’s usually some way in which one is better than the other. There may be two ways to get home for example, both taking about the same time to travel. One might have better scenery, though, or involve fewer difficult turns or less traffic this time of day. This is different, though: \frac{3}{4} or \frac{6}{8} are two ways to describe the same number. Which one is “better”?

Wavehead is at the blackboard; on it are written 3/4 and 6/8. The teacher explains, 'They're just equivalent. Neither one is the off-brand.'
Mark Anderson’s Andertoons for the 20th of April, 2020. Essays featuring some mention of Andertoons are gathered at this link.

The only answer is, better for what? What do you figure to do with this number afterwards? I admit, and suppose most people have, a preference for \frac{3}{4} . But that’s trained into us, in large part, by homework set to reduce fractions to “lowest terms”. There’s honest enough reasons behind that. It seems wasteful to have a factor in the numerator that’s immediately divided out by the denominator.

If this were 25 years ago, I could ask how many of you have written out a check for twenty-two and 3/4 dollars, then, rather than twenty-two and 75/100 dollars? The example is dated but the reason to prefer an equivalent form is not. If I know that I need the number represented by \frac{3}{4} , and will soon be multiplying it by eight, then \frac{6}{8} may save me the trouble of thinking what three times two is. Or if I’ll be adding it to \frac{5}{8} , or something like that. If I’m measuring this for a recipe I need to cut in three, because the original will make three dozen cookies and I could certainly eat three dozen cookies, then \frac{3}{4} may be more convenient than \frac{6}{8} . What is the better depends on what will clarify the thing I want to do.

A significant running thread throughout all mathematics, not just arithmetic, is finding equivalent forms. Ways to write the same concept, but in a way that makes some other work easier. Or more likely to be done correctly. Or, if the equivalent form is more attractive, more likely to be learned or communicated. It’s of value.

Jan Eliot’s Stone Soup Classics rerun for the 20th is a joke about how one can calculate what one is interested in. In this case, going from the number of days left in school to the number of hours and minutes and even seconds left. Personally, I have never had trouble remembering there are 24 hours in the day, nor that there are 86,400 seconds in the day. That there are 1,440 minutes in the day refuses to stick in my mind. Your experiences may vary.

Thaves’s Frank and Ernest for the 22nd is the Roman Numerals joke for the week, shifting the number ten to the representation “X” to the prefix “ex”.

Harry Bliss’s Bliss for the 23rd speaks of “a truck driver with a PhD in mathematical logic”. It’s an example of signifying intelligence through mathematics credentials. (It’s also a bit classicist, treating an intelligent truck driver as an unlikely thing.)

I’m caught up! This coming Sunday I hope to start discussingthis week’s comics in a post at this link. And for this week? I don’t know; maybe I’ll figure something to write. We’ll see. Thanks for reading.

Author: Joseph Nebus


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