Dr. Dawn's blog

The FoxTrot Strip from November 6, 2005 contained a “numerical word search”

You can find the strip here.

There are seven clues which are arithmetic problems, but there is also the derivative of 43981 x , the definite integral of x^3 from 0 to 16, and the sum from k equals 0 to 47 of k squared.    I asked my calculus students to perform all these calculations.

In this FoxTrot strip Paige has been cramming for her math final and thus is answering all questions in mathematical notation.

http://assets.amuniversal.com/b07d90305e30012ee3bf00163e41dd5b

(Its the May 22, 2005 strip, if the link doesn’t work.)

In precalculus I asked the students:

1) What temperature will it be tomorrow?  Is it going to be hot tomorrow?

(The answer is sin^{-1}(1) =90 degrees, so it will be hot).

2) What does the girl (Paige) want for snack?

(The answer is 3.14159265359…, so she wants pie).

In calculus of sequences and series, you could also ask what the discount was in the fourth panel, which requires computing the sum of an infinite geometric series.

In an algebra class one could ask what time Paige went to bed (\sqrt{121}= 11:00) or What is on TV? (4!=24).

In this FoxTrot strip Jason is “helping” Paige do her homework without even looking in the book.  He claims the answer to question 36 is lim_{x \rightarrow \infty} \frac{x+2}{x-2}.

I asked my students to evaluate this limit, but think this wasn’t a very good use of the comic strip.  If you have a better idea, please comment or email me.

http://assets.amuniversal.com/8e0befc05cee012ee3bd00163e41dd5b

(If the link doesn’t work try going to  http://www.amureprints.com/reprints/sphinx_search , entering the keyword “question” and checking the FoxTrot box.  It was the first hit when I used this search.  The fact that it is from September 13, 2001    may also help you find it.)