(if you enjoy these cartoons – and hey, who doesn’t enjoy a good Stephen Hawking joke – then check out my Patreon!)
The only caveat: Words are not necessarily fungible.
For example, many of my pictures are worth only 500 “Huh”s and 500 “Nope”s.
Professional Development
Silly folks! It’s much more complicated than that. Teaching = Explanation + Problem Sets + Office Hours!
The Interesting Part of Mathematics
I mean, equality is just an edge case. Hardly the meat of the subject!
Applied Probability
I considered several other punch lines for this, including:
- “Ugh. Physicists.”
- “Ugh. Empiricists.”
- “Ugh. I hate reality.”
Run a Regression
I wonder how many of my cartoons make fun of misapplied statistical techniques?
I know, LET’S RUN A REGRESSION ANALYSIS
Got It, Thanks
Some folks really didn’t identify with this one. For me, it’s the first 2 months of teaching any class.
What Mathematicians Do
“Watching mathematicians try to explain their work to laypeople” really ought to be a televised sport. It’s a uniquely inexplicable job.
Bacterial Inspiration
The nice thing about drawing bacteria is that it’s okay when they change shape from frame to frame. They’re squooshy bags of water!
It’s less credible when it happens with my people/desks/chalkboards.
Having Three Kids
I’ve heard this from lots of quarters: the marginal challenge of adding a third child is huge, and the marginal life satisfaction isn’t necessarily positive. But past 3, the marginal challenge decreases, and marginal satisfaction grows.
Takeaway? Babies are super cute and wicked hard to raise. The end.
Intellectual History
Newton: “Hey, did you guys notice how stuff falls to the ground?”
Everybody: “Whoa, now that you mention it, yeah!”
Anyone who has read Dickens has encountered an argument for why we shouldn’t pay fiction writers by the word, either.
Contra That One xkcd Comic
I asked my niece about this. “Why are you stabbing Elmo’s eye?”
“I stab his eye!” she reported.
Carpet Pricing
I’m proud of this cartoon because the joke consists entirely of an exponent.
Time Travel Commute
I just read Timescape and found it both (A) a pretty rich portrait of academic life, and (B) a weirdly self-contradictory vision of time travel. Anyone want to explain to me why it actually makes more sense than I believe?
To be clear: no, nobody actually knows almost half of mathematics! This is a not-to-scale pie chart. The to-scale version would just look entirely red.
Agree to Disagree
I think the last panel describes a surprising number of math fans/teachers/professionals/bloggers.
Most conjectures are a bargain at that price, if you ask me!
Pi Chart
That’s right, a pi vs. pie pun! That’s the sort of high-quality content you can expect here at Math With Bad Drawings Dot Com.
Infinity War
monkey beg to differ about mister charles dickens who not paid by word but paid in installment for 20 part serial publication of many novels like bleak house & david copperfield & etc. btw yesterday monkey recommend follower of monkey say blog go check out math with bad drawings. monkey hope this result in sales + good reviews.
“Got It, Thanks” : where does that leave me? My classes are all approximately 8 weeks long. Seriously.
Your pie chart puts me in the mind of “Last year’s maths is easy, this year’s maths is hard and next year’s maths is impossible.”
oh my god I work as a tutor and “got it thanks” is the BANE of my existence like I want to respect them and not call them liars but sometimes I Know they havent got it but also sometimes that was the only explanation I could think of so I just have to play along with the lie and everyone loses
I have on occasion (usually at the beginning of term with a new class) responded with “That’s great! Come to the board and show everyone who hasn’t got it yet” – I love peer pressure.
Got it thanks made me remember my math teacher with the worst breath I ever smelled before. He was so thorough in his explanation that I held my breath for 5 minutes at a time, and still didn’t understand. Just couldn’t focus while praying for my math teacher to move on to the next victim. I mean pupil.
re: Having Three Children
Father of five, can confirm.
Don’t forget that even though the rewards ratio gets better, the effort still increases linearly.
Also, you misspelled fuzziness…
re: The Learning Cycle
The ratio of the actual magnitude of Terrifying Nonsense to the magnitude of Boring Triviality is nondecreasing over time.