Comics about mathematics, science, and the student life.

Remain On Path

A student has a path that stretches out before them, with signs on either side telling them to stay on the path.

Sad, but too often true.

16 Aug 2019

Historical Introduction

A professor introduces the class to a new topic and begins with the historical introduction, even if it's not very helpful.

Is this way more confusing? Maybe, but we’re going to forge ahead anyway!

14 Aug 2019

Artistic Rendition

A scientist presents their data, and it is really clean and perfect. An audience member comments on how great the data is, mentioning that the error bars are so small that they can't be seen. The scientist replies by saying that their in-house artist "cleaned up" the diagram because it was super noisy.

Presenting experimental data: the art of making your errors not seem too bad.

12 Aug 2019

Teacher Evaluation

A filled-out evaluation form. Under the "improvements" section, the student draws a circle and declares that this isn't "good enough" to be a square.

In an ideal world, we would all have to go through a drawing course before making diagrams on the board while teaching. It sounds like a small matter, but having a good diagram is crucial to understanding some topics in physics and mathematics.

09 Aug 2019

Context

A student reads a passage from a textbook and doesn't quite understand, but they decide that the context will help them figure it out (it won't).

This is part of the reason why you can’t just expect to blaze through a textbook. Understanding all of the terms requires patience.

07 Aug 2019

Equal Time

A student decides to spend equal time on two different assignments, even though one is way shorter.

My inability to distinguish between the importance of various assignments really contributed to being much more stressed out than I should have been in school.

05 Aug 2019

Membership Perks

A membership card advocating theory X, which offers a bunch of perks.

You get all the benefits of being in a club, especially the tendency to protect each other when a member is criticized!

02 Aug 2019

Information Telephone

A lineup of people are transmitting a piece of scientific news. As it passes from the researcher to the university committee to the science journalist to the media organization to the social media influencer to the news anchor to a family member, the message can't help but get garbled.

The best is when it comes full circle and I get back “noisy” news.

31 Jul 2019

Labels

In the first panel, a student is unsure if their supervisor is actually invested in their research. In the second panel, he explains that his supervisor has given labels to the equations as "ThatOneINeverUnderstood".

You can tell a lot about a person by how they label their equation in LaTeX.

29 Jul 2019

Filter

In the first panel, the physics professor tells the class that they won't be studying the real world, and instead will live in the land of approximation. The professor lists off a bunch of handwaving that will be done, and this makes the math student in the class get up and leave.

Becoming better in physics means getting used to the fact that you’re only ever approximating reality. That’s the price to use those shiny mathematical tools we know and love.

26 Jul 2019