(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
