MathematiComics!

1 Monster Invites Another

How one monster grows into a quarter-thousand (& counting)…!

Escher’s “Approaches to Infinity”: There Must Be Stars

I take this passage in Escher’s essay to be particularly appropriate for comics creators:

Museum Courtyard: Above & Below

It looks like we’ve learned our lesson from the last time we played on a three-dimensional staircase …

Escher’s “Approaches to Infinity” Part 2: Music & Eternity

“to approach eternity by means of sounds”…?

Watch Your Step

Three-point perspective staircase distortion, drawn at Currier Art Museum …

Escher Exhibit

Journal comic inspired by a recent visit to the Currier Museum’s mind-bending exposition…

Staircase Encounter

(Drawn for “M.C. Escher: Reality and Illusion” at The Currier Museum.)

Hotel Infinity

“Up ahead in the distance, / I saw a shimmering light…”:

From One Math to Another

Gosh it’s nice to get home to NH.

Deferential Calculus

The most self-effacing of all maths.

Hotel Infinity: Quiet Hours

You don’t always want to encounter infinity in a strange hotel …

2×2=5 Talkin’ Blues Video

Finally, a video version of our earlier all-comics proof …

Pythagorean Maxims #16-30

More lifestyle advice from our brilliant & eccentric Ancient Greek mathematician …

Patterns of Ideas (Hardy)

Quoting G. H. Hardy’s 1940 essay, “A Mathematician’s Apology”…

Mathematics is an Art (Lockhart)

One reader’s notes to Paul Lockhart’s thought-provoking “A Mathematician’s Lament” …

Pythagorean Maxims #1-15

“Rules of the Good Life,” according to one of Ancient Greece’s most amazing mathematicians …

100 Pounds of Apples

Here’s a delicious puzzle with a counter-intuitive result, based on the “potato paradox”:

Alexander Horned Steer

The final image ever captured by our late Mythematical Beasts Dept. editor …

Escher’s “Approaches to Infinity” Part 1

The first of a finite series of comics adapting Escher’s 1971 essay…

Talkin’ 2×2=5 Blues

Are we allowed to do talkin’ blues algebra proofs? ~ If NOT, maybe this is why — here’s one inspired by Lewis Carroll. ~…

Math Flower

“When are we ever gonna see this in the REAL WORLD?”

Patchwork Cantor Angel

Here’s a close up of another such creature …

Cliche Conversion Charts

Bird(s) in bush as a function of bird(s) in hand, and other relationships …

Recursive Load

I’ve been thinking about recursion lately, which of course (if you think about it) usually means I’m thinking about thinking about recursion, which of…

Pointy Things + Round Things

Circles and Triangles are in many ways about a far apart as shapes can get; and yet… and yet.

Archimedes’ Fatal Work Ethic

You have to respect a mathematician who’s so engrossed in his work that he doesn’t even notice the Romans invading his city…

Dinner-Party Puzzle Fail

Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) learns how NOT to perform post-prandial high-stakes testing…

Lewis Carroll’s River Crossing Puzzle

This logic puzzle was a favorite of math professor (and part-time wonderlander) Charles Dodgson …

Alexander Horned Sphere

Sometimes you have to draw such a thing before it jumps up and comes to life and runs away on you …

Decision Tree

Discrete Regretroactology is the study of finite sequences of decisions and their effects on the appearances of stick figures involved in them …

Pythagoras Tree

It takes some careful attention to grow a healthy specimen …

Cantor Angel

At first glance, your typical Cantor Set can appear rather stilted & stodgy… But what if there were a different way to envision this…

More Knots

I guess technically some of these are knots, and some are… well… not.

Un-possible Cubes

Hollow cubes, both possible and un-possible:

Prime Spirals

Just playing around a bit with the Ulam spiral… It makes me want to cover the walls with

Ama tu ritmo / Love Your Rhythm (Dario)

A passionate Dario poem with a mathematical pulse …

Fractal Cross ‘n’ Boxes

Interesting how a very square up-down left-right set of rules produces such diagonal negative space…

Overlaid Fibonacci Spirals

Here are twin nested Fibonacci spirals overlaid with a single blue spiral …

Borromean Rings

They look like they’re tightly knotted, but if you look closely you’ll see that no two rings are linked with each other…

Sleepless Fractal Cross

Just a little fractal cross that appeared in my sketchbook after two days without sleep…

Circle Gasket Snowflake

Can you see the rule behind this 4th-iteration hand-drawn snowflake fractal?

Knotted Circles + Squares

While riding on a plane lately, I found myself drawing lots of knots…

Sierpinski’s Pizza

Dude, where can I get one of those Sierpinski pizza slicers?

Twin Fibonacci Spiral

Taking shape from the world-famous Fibonacci sequence…

Math Medallion Gasket Frame

More fun with gaskets & distorted Sierpinskis.

Circled Sierpinski Tangents

A loose confederation of doodly gaskets and aspiring sierpinski triangles …

Distorted Koch Curve

This one started as a koch curve design, with vertices stretched to fill the rectangular page:

Infinite Doodle

It might not look it, but adding all the details to this drawing took FOREVER.

Binary Gasket Tree (in Bloom)

This one started as a hand-doodled binary tree, but it quickly bloomed Appolonian gaskets between the branches….

Spinning Gasket Spiral Mandala

The triangles point the way…