Comics about mathematics, science, and the student life.

Mountain of Mathematics

Student: "Now that I'm done calculus, I must be close to knowing all of math?" Tutor: "Yeah..." (Second panel shows a mountain with calculus at the very bottom.) Tutor: "I think we still have work to do."

Really? I thought that as soon as I finished my undergraduate degree, all of math was essentially the same, but a bit more difficult.

04 Mar 2020

Follows Easily

Textbook: "The result follows easily from the previous equations." Student: "If it follows so easily, why couldn't you take the time to show it?! It's not like you're trying to teach students or anything..."

Okay, I get it when I’m reading a research paper. But for a textbook, these kinds of details should probably be shown. Maybe I’m just tackling textbooks that are too far ahead of me…

02 Mar 2020

Sentience

Professor presenting: "Bosons are quite friendly and will share states, but fermions? Forget about it. They are like lone wolves." Caption: Physicists: The people who love to give sentience to everything, from equations to particles to stars to galaxies.

How else are we going to get funding if we don’t make our equations sound fun and engaging?

28 Feb 2020

Variable Conditions

Before a test: "This stuff is so easy!" During a test: "Ugh, why does it feel like I'm suddenly much less intelligent?!"

Temporal pressure does funny things to a person.

26 Feb 2020

Research Bubble

Five research papers reference each other, with no one actually doing any work. Researcher: "Did anyone actually take the time to look outside of these five papers?!"

In mathematics, this is known as “proof by circularity”, and is partly where I got the idea for this comic (from someone else).

However, my real motivation came from the fact that I was looking at the literature for a specific topic, and I kept on seeing the same few papers being referenced. I was hoping to find something new, but I couldn’t seem to break this “bubble” of citations.

24 Feb 2020

Arbitrary Function

Professor: "Okay, so to motivate this theorem, let's start with an arbitrary function..." (Draws essentially a curvy function.) Caption: Every professor's idea of an "arbitrary function" seems to be a sine wave.

Now that you’ve seen it, you won’t be able to unsee it.

21 Feb 2020

Textbook Explanations

Colleague: "A lot of people are complaining about your new textbook. They're saying that you don't actually explain anything." Professor: "That's ridiculous. I explained everything that was confusing to me."

I’ll file this one under curse of the expert.

19 Feb 2020

Supervisor Choice

Student: "Okay, time to find a supervisor for the next several years. I need to make sure we are a good fit beyond superficial reasons...OOh, this person has a cool website, so they must be good!"

I can’t be the only one who uses this criterion!

17 Feb 2020

Exhaustion

Student 1: "I heard this guy's nickname is Professor Exhaustion." Student 2: "Because his class if tiring?" S1: "No, because he likes to prove everything by exhaustion." (Door of classroom is ajar, in which the professor is speaking) "Let's check that 6079 is prime by going through cases!"

He also doesn’t believe in exhaustion, since you can’t check each case. Nor is he a fan of the continuum.

14 Feb 2020

Proof By Previous Result

Student 1: "That last proof was difficult, right?" Student 2: "Not really. It was like three lines." S1: "Only three!? Mine took a whole page! What technique did you use." S2: "'Proof by quoting a previous result.'"

“To prove this statement, I invoke Theorem 3.2 of our textbook in conjunction with Corollary 67.1, which together implies our result trivially.”

12 Feb 2020