2010-10-24
Explanation
This comic is titled "1 + 1 = ?" and presents how different types of thinkers would respond to this simple arithmetic question. A 6 year old cheerfully answers "2!" -- the correct and straightforward answer. A philosopher says "Induction is impossible," referencing the philosophical problem of induction (whether we can truly justify believing that mathematical or logical rules will continue to hold). A computer scientist says "Whoa, whoa... addition is the machine's job," joking that programmers delegate actual computation to computers rather than doing it themselves.
A mathematician responds with "Define '1'," reflecting how higher mathematics is obsessed with rigorous foundational definitions and cannot take even the most basic concepts for granted. A physicist says "Ballpark... about a thousand," satirizing the stereotype that physicists work with rough approximations and order-of-magnitude estimates rather than exact answers, since in physics the precise value often matters less than getting the right scale.
The votey panel extends the mathematician's joke into a brilliant graph plotting "Confidence that 1=1" against "Math Education." Confidence starts at 100% (naive certainty), then drops as students learn to question definitions: "Define '1'," "Define '='," "Define 'define'," and so on into an infinite regress. It briefly spikes when someone thinks "Aha! I can prove all of logic from first principles!" only to crash again when asked to "Define 'logic'." This is a clever reference to foundational crises in mathematics, including Godel's incompleteness theorems, which showed that no sufficiently powerful mathematical system can prove its own consistency.