math-and-war
Original: math-and-war on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Caption (top banner): MATHEMATICIANS FARE POORLY IN WAR.
Panel 1: Two medieval soldiers stand side by side. The soldier on the left, wearing chainmail and carrying a bow, looks at a shield held by the soldier on the right.
Left soldier: What's that symbol mean?
Right soldier (a man with dark hair and a beard): Nothing, but if I can get enough arrow strikes, I can calculate pi!
(The shield on the right is painted with a square divided into four quadrants with a circle inscribed inside it — the classic Monte Carlo / circle-in-square method for estimating pi.)
Bottom banner text: THIS COMIC THANKS TO SOONISH BUYERS! CLICK FOR MORE INFO!
Votey: A hand-drawn Venn diagram with two overlapping ovals. The left oval is labeled "Stupid" and the right oval is labeled "intelligent." An arrow points to the overlapping region in the middle, with a handwritten label below reading "This comic."
Panel 1: Two medieval soldiers stand side by side. The soldier on the left, wearing chainmail and carrying a bow, looks at a shield held by the soldier on the right.
Left soldier: What's that symbol mean?
Right soldier (a man with dark hair and a beard): Nothing, but if I can get enough arrow strikes, I can calculate pi!
(The shield on the right is painted with a square divided into four quadrants with a circle inscribed inside it — the classic Monte Carlo / circle-in-square method for estimating pi.)
Bottom banner text: THIS COMIC THANKS TO SOONISH BUYERS! CLICK FOR MORE INFO!
Votey: A hand-drawn Venn diagram with two overlapping ovals. The left oval is labeled "Stupid" and the right oval is labeled "intelligent." An arrow points to the overlapping region in the middle, with a handwritten label below reading "This comic."
Alt text
An SMBC comic. Top banner caption: "Mathematicians fare poorly in war." In a single panel, two medieval soldiers stand together. The left soldier, in chainmail with a bow, asks, "What's that symbol mean?" The right soldier, a bearded man, holds a shield painted with a circle inscribed inside a square divided into quadrants, and answers, "Nothing, but if I can get enough arrow strikes, I can calculate pi!" The joke: he plans to use incoming arrows as random points to estimate pi by the Monte Carlo method, which would require getting shot at a lot. Votey: a hand-drawn Venn diagram of two overlapping circles labeled "Stupid" and "intelligent," with an arrow pointing to the overlapping middle region labeled "This comic."
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.