Math story problems in cartoons

[cheril59]

How many of you guys 'n gals have heard math story problems in cartoons? I used Thetawise to solve the problems being described and while some of them worked, others made no sense.

Take this number from The Raccoons episode "Black Belt Bentley!" for example:


Here's another one from the Foster's episode "Mondo Coco".


An example that made no sense I used from the Bump in the Night episode "Story Problems". Thetawise couldn't determine the dimensions or measurements of Billy's closet or how many pounds of Moth Flakes protecting 36 gallons of diet cola.


Here's a couple more inconsistencies:

 

[Mejo]

There’s a page on TV Tropes called “Writers Cannot Do Math” that list some more examples of this: Western Animation - TV Tropes

 

[cheril59]

Robot Jones' poem he wrote in English class in the "Parents" episode. Even Thetawise couldn't make heads or tails of this.

 

[the_joker]

There was an episode of Regular Show with Rigby not having a high school diploma featuring a math problem, though I don't remember what the problem was, and I'm too lazy to look it up.

I can't say the example from Foster's was a good math problem since you could use intuition to find out the answer. Tammy was closer to the mall and on a faster train than Suzy.

The one with the closet mentioned it having an unorthodox shape, so a figure would normally be included, though I don't know the chances of the artists caring to draw one. Thetawise may have mentioned different units of length, but one could always do a conversion. I guess all that didn't matter since the next sentence was nonsensical.

The problem about the "train to Cuba" had something going, but too bad whoever came up with this didn't consider what the problem was asking.

The one with a fork in the road sounded like the writers threw in a bunch of math terms for the sake of featuring some kind of math problem. It mentioned a fork in the road, but then it said to keep going, so only one path mattered. Even the details about the alternate roads were weird because the problem didn't say why those details were important. The first road was "parallel", so that could mean another road would either intersect the initial path (creating a "3rd road", though I guess that might not matter too much since the fork was probably supposed to be the important detail, and that "3rd road" would have to come before the fork, but that also meant being parallel was unimportant) or be perpendicular to the second road, but - again - why did that matter?

I don't remember much about Robot Jones, but that show was a comedy, so the math problem featured was probably intentionally nonsensical.

 

[Classic Speedy]

Of course there's the Tiny Toons episode "One Minute 'Til Three" where Granny keeps throwing out complicated problems for the class:

"Using Fosdick's Method of Bifractal Computation, give me the minimum pixels needed on a bllateral view screen." (Answer: 259)

 

[aegisrawks]

There was a cartoon pilot that was about solving a math problem and it looked like it would be a regular thing if it got greenlit as a full series.

 

[Silverstar]

There was a cartoon pilot that was about solving a math problem and it looked like it would be a regular thing if it got greenlit as a full series.

That kind of sounds like a CN short called "Trevor!". It was about a boy at school trying to solve a complex math problem. The short was introduced by Double D of Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy.

 

[wiley207]

Then there's the classic "train collision" math problem featured in media. In the very early Simpsons episode "Bart the Genius", Bart tries to solve such a problem on an intelligence test Mrs. Krabappel assigns. The question in problem: "At 7:30 AM, an express train traveling 60 miles an hour leaves Santa Fe bound for Phoenix, 520 miles away. At the same time, a local train traveling 30 miles an hour and carrying 40 passengers leaves Phoenix bound for Santa Fe. It's eight cars long and always carries the same number of passengers in each car. An hour later, a number of passengers equal to half the number of minutes past the hour get off, but three times as many plus six get on. At the second stop, half the passengers plus two get off, but twice as many get on as got on at the first stop." Bart imagines himself being on the latter train hauled by a steam locomotive, as more and more passengers with numbers over their heads get on, but the creepy conductor catches Bart as a stowaway, bringing him to the engineer Martin Prince (with black hair!), and ultimately both trains in the math problem collide and shatter, and Bart snaps back to reality as he falls out of his classroom chair. (This implies the problem ended with something like "How many passengers are on each train and how many miles between both cities is where the two trains will collide?")

The Nickelodeon Doug episode "Doug's Math Problem" opened with Doug struggling on a math test with such a problem (and ends up failing the test). "A train leaves Bloatsburg traveling at 100 kilometers an hour. At the same time, a train leaves New Hampster traveling at 200 kilometers an hour. If New Hampster is 600 kilometers from Bloatsburg, how long before the two trains collide?" Doug imagines himself sitting on the 100 kph train, hauled by an old-fashioned -looking steam locomotive, and finds himself about to collide with the 200 kph train, a modern diesel streamliner with its locomotive resembling an angry fish. The fantasy ends with zooming into Doug's screaming mouth, followed by crashing as everything goes black, and then the episode title card plays.

 

[cheril59]

The one with the closet mentioned it having an unorthodox shape, so a figure would normally be included, though I don't know the chances of the artists caring to draw one. Thetawise may have mentioned different units of length, but one could always do a conversion. I guess all that didn't matter since the next sentence was nonsensical.

I did the closet problem again, except I changed the 2 and one-half meters to 8 and one-fifth feet. However...

 

[the_joker]

I did the closet problem again, except I changed the 2 and one-half meters to 8 and one-fifth feet. However...

A closet would normally have the shape of a rectangular prism as those are easier to make, so you'd only need the lengths of the 3 different dimensions. The problem suggested that the closet's bases are rectangles of different shapes, so that's why a picture would be needed (overusing the word "by" didn't help, so a picture would also remove ambiguity).

But all that didn't matter because the problem didn't say what the closet had to do with the moth flakes and diet cola, and the sentence about the moth flakes and cola didn't provide sufficient information on its own, so it was another nonsensical problem that just had math terms.