![[0012] High-Flying Dreams](http://www.sandraandwoo.com/comics/2008-12-01-[0012]-high-flying-dreams.png "[0012] High-Flying Dreams")
Bonus points for everyone who recognizes the formula on the chalkboard in the third panel. Extra bonus points for everyone who proves its correctness. 
Please see the third comment for more information…
- Woo: What do you want to be when you grow up?
- Sandra: It’s always been my dream to become a math professor.
- Woo: Math? Isn’t that pretty difficult? I’m always having trouble telling apart four from five. Let alone five from six!
- Sandra: If you have the knack, math isn’t that tough anymore! One day, the name North will be mentioned in the same breath as Newton, Gauss and Turing!
- Professor: I am delighted to award you as the first woman in history with the Fields Medal, Mrs. North.
- Sandra: During the test last week, I didn’t remember the quadratic formula…
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Yay for girls in math!
Schoenfeld’s bound on the prime counting function?
I can’t see it; it’s too small.
The end of the first line looks like ‘bacon,’ though.
@ Anonymous: Very good guess with Lowell Schoenfeld. However, it is supposed to be his non-asymptotic version of the Riemann hypothesis. Well, after googling a bit, I’ve found this specific formula only in the linked Wikipedia article. So I hope that it’s not a hoax. (Math at the level of the Riemann hypothesis is really beyond me, so I can’t tell myself…)
…..
Nerds.
Also, my first comment here! : D
Love the comic so far. Best start of any I’ve seen before!
Given that I read about 60, that’s saying something.
i’m with johnny – definitely a strong start. can’t wait to see where it goes
i too read around 60 comics, and i’m finding this one every bit as interesting so far as some that have run for years. keep up the excellent work
I’m sorry to be picky, but the honorific “Mrs.” in English is used with a married name. If the child’s family name is “North”, it would be quite a co-incidence if she also married someone named “North”. OTOH, it may just be that her imagination does not fill in these details – she imagines that at the advanced age shown [;-)] she would be a “Mrs.” rather than a “Miss”, eh? [I am growing to like this comic strip, even reading it backwards ...]
When I wrote the dialog, I imagined that Sandra thinks that she is married at this time. I didn’t consider the issue that women usually adopt the family name of their husband, but I think it’s better this way nonetheless. Apart from your rationale, it would also be very confusing to the reader if the professor would say: “…, Mrs. Smith.” At least in Germany it is also not that unusual that women, particularly successful sportswomen or show stars, keep their old family name after marriage.
It’s actually not that uncommon for women in the sciences to keep their maiden name at least for professional purposes, especially if they started publishing their work under that name.
Really enjoying the comic, by the way!
Awesome comic here. I’m confused about one thing though: according to the cast section, Sandra is supposedly very good at math, especially differentiation, which kind of contradicts the comic here. Is she just that bad at quadratic formulas alone and great with all the other areas, or is this comic before she got better at math?
[...] and take on serious subjects like human rights in Burma. Anyway, any comic that has a little girl dreaming of winning the Fields Medal is a winner in my [...]
On the subject of Sandra’s last name–I learned about Marie Curie many years ago. One day, I found out that her husband’s name was Pierre Curie. I swear that I honestly thought to myself, “Neat! She married a guy with the same last name!” True story.
-b + or – the square root of b squared -4ac all divided by 2a.
Quadratic Formula
Anyway I’m loving the comic so far.
About the “Mrs.” part – it’s not all that odd, though it does imply she is married. Some husbands take their wife’s family name instead after all.
Why is a 11 year old girl having to use the quadratic formula?
I move that the name of this strip be changed to “Weapons of Math Destruction.”
I like it.
Negative B plus or minus the square root of B squared minus 4 A C all over 2A! XD
I knew that from memory!
ACK!
i know the quadradic formula and an easy way to remember it. just sing along with it to the “pop goes the weasel” tune!
try it! you’ll be surprised how well it works
Um, I’d have thought she’d be MS. North, not MRS. You might want to do something about it.
Turing is kind of an odd choice for a list of famous mathematicians. Don’t get me wrong, he was a genius, and in his day they called him a mathematician — but he’s usually thought of now as a computer scientist, since his work pretty much created the field.
I remember wanting to be a famous mathematician when I was a child. But over time, I realized that I just didn’t have the “knack” for it.
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I think its amazing that she knew it in the first place after all shes only 11 and I didn’t learn the quadratic formula till I got to Algebra 2 at 15 years old and I remember that I learned it very fast but then again I always did excel at school back then especially math
@ Xohan: because I’m 12 years old and I have to remember the quadratic formula..tho its quite easy…from memory!
[-B +- Root(B^2-4AC)]/2a
Tip: I had my math exam today.
Can you make a blown-up version of the third panel? I want to verify the expression on the chalkboard.
@ Novil:
You don’t understand the Riemann Hypothesis? I know it looks and sounds scary and difficult but it’s actually pretty simple. It just turns the area under a function into a bunch of rectangles and adds them all together to get a quick and easy approximation of that area.
…it’s the lazy man’s calculus.
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Disregard that. I was thinking Riemann sums. Yeah, his hypothesis is crazy annoying to understand.
fuc* that, i forgot the quadratic formula today.
Haha, we had a song to remember that formula when I was in Middle School. It’s to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”. It goes:
The opposite of b
plus or minus the square root
of
b squared minus four a c
all over two a
(a + b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2
Problem?
‘head explodes’ I’m am not a math girl. at all. T.T I can’t tell you how many times I’ve resorted to counting my fingers and toes, which is really, really sad for someone who’s in college.
x=(-b +/- [Square Root of: b*b +/- 4ac])/2.
I forgot it too on my last test XD
@ Novil:
@ GreyRogue:
Case in point: my wife, PhD in astrophysics/astronomy, kept her last name. We agreed that if we had children, boys would have my last name and girls would have hers, just to screw with the school systems. Unfortunately that isn’t going to happen.