Comics about mathematics, science, and the student life.

Simplification

Two people are asked to imagine a car going down a hill. The regular person imagines a car driving down, while the physics student imagines a block of mass M sliding down a wedge.

If we taught you correctly in school, you won’t ever imagine any “real” objects. Those are for the engineers to worry about!

06 Sep 2019

Mopping

The first person is impressed with how the second is a researcher, and says that it must be awesome. The researcher replies that they sometimes feel just like a janitor. The first person is confused, and the researcher explains that, sometimes, they have to go ahead and clean up the literature of a bunch of mistakes.

“But wait, isn’t the scientific literature peer-reviewed and free of mistakes?”

“Yes, I think that was the dream at some point…”

04 Sep 2019

Old Material

A student complains in class because the teacher is going over material they covered last semester. The teacher is surprised that the student covered everything in the textbook, and the student clarifies that they *only* got to Chapter Four.

I suspect the number of students who ever cover the material in an entire textbook of any kind is vanishingly small. And yet, we often get to the end of the semester thinking that we’ve learned all we need to know about a subject.

02 Sep 2019

Information Loss

One person is incredulous that their physicist friend does not believe in conservation of information. The friend explains that they lost faith in the idea after seeing so many students forget topics that he taught them.

The real challenge would be explaining this information loss if information was conserved!

30 Aug 2019

Powerful Tools

On the left, a mathematics professor presents their students with safety scissors, promising that the real thing will come after ten more weeks of work. On the right, a physics professor simply gives them the sharpest object they can find.

My favourite part is when a physics professor will skip all of the details surrounding a mathematical idea and simply say, “This is what you need to do the calculations here.”

28 Aug 2019

Research Niche

A scientist walks with a friend, who remarks that they must be an absolute expert in their field after studying it for years. A thought bubble emerges showing how their specialty a corner of a corner of a field.

Most of the time, I’m just trying to redirect the conversation toward that specific niche where I feel comfortable.

26 Aug 2019

Leaky

On the left, there's a bowl that represents the brain and is being filled with knowledge. On the right, there's the reality, which is a bowl with a bunch of holes in it.

“Don’t you remember everything you learned last semester? I’m just going to pretend that you do.”

23 Aug 2019

Mathematical Majesty

Two peasants approach the mathematical king with presents. The first offers only an example in which a conjecture is true. The king is not impressed. The second peasant brings a shiny counterexample, and the kind automatically takes a liking to this peasant.

Now that would be a wild world if mathematicians were kings.

21 Aug 2019

Local Minimum

One person tells a friend that they wish they could get into an exercise habit, but it's just so difficult. The friend shrugs and tells them that they are trapped in a local minimum of laziness.

Unfortunately, this happens to all of us in some area of our lives.

19 Aug 2019

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