Trivia / Spiked Math

• Keep Circulating the Tapes: As of 2021, the comic is offline. However, it has been preserved in the Internet Archive.
• Missing Episode: Even before the whole website went under, many comics had been removed for unknown reasons. In particular, it seems like comics involving sex and/or stereotypes were more likely to be taken down. The missing comics were skipped in the archive and by the prev/next buttons, but the random button could still try to send you to one, which would give you a 404 page. Here's a mostly complete list of missing comics:
  • 006 - Clever Alex: Alex wants to know if a girl is under 16 before he "roots" her.
  • 021 - Flowers: Albert the flower feels left out because he's the only one whose number of petals is not a Fibonacci number.
  • 023 - I Like My Girls: A girl and a guy mention their preferences in men/women and numbers.
  • 024 - Fractalman: Fractalman, a superhero whose power is "I have lots of penises".
  • 026 - Mathematicians: Shows that mathematicians may say something like "7.43" if asked for a number between 1 and 10.
  • 029 - New Bike: An old sex joke in comic form.
  • 032 - Your Mom: Math-flavoured Your Mom jokes.
  • 033 - Why Math?: Because sudoku, apparently.
  • 036 - Difference Between Numbers And People: It's a period joke. The original version contains an ambiguous statement whose most obvious interpretation is false (a number with a decimal point can be irrational), which is pointed out in the "fixed" version on the same page.
  • 047 - Love Tunnel: 2 and 5 ride a love tunnel.
  • 061 - Almost Every Graph: Albert the graph feels left out because he doesn't have K3 (basically a triangle) as a subgraph.
  • 065 - Stupid Question: A student asks a stupid question.
  • 066 - He Figured It Out: A strange comic in which a gay mathematician figures out that "straight + beer = gay" and buys a lot of beer.
  • 070 - Don't Forget To Bring A Towel: A professor has to teach while wearing a towel because his crazy ex-wife took his money.
  • 084 - Finally Got A Job: Alex gets a job at a fast food restaurant after getting his PhD.
  • 090 - Squeeze Theorem: A woman suggests using the Squeeze Theorem to calculate a limit... and the man decides to squeeze her boobs.
  • 108 - Matchmaking: A comic where numbers are paired up with corresponding logarithms. The creator admitted that this was a reject comic.
  • 130 - New Years: A mathematician counts down using prime numbers.
  • 138 - I Like My Women Like I Like My Math: "Easy and at a high school level"
  • 145 - Living in a Nullspace: According to this comic, if you live with a woman, all your money will get mapped to zero. The comic also calls men rational, but very dense.
  • 148 - Alice's Brackets: A comic that uses coordinates like (0,0) to represent breasts.
  • 158 - Millenium Prize Problems
  • 160 - Professors, sigh.: Professors argue about which type of math is more important.
  • 161 - Favorite Color: It's a hex color code.
  • 163 - Sweet Talk: A guy uses math puns to say that he find a girl sexy, and asks if she wants to 69.
  • 167 - Meeting Girls: A mathematician tries to explain his occupation in layman's terms. The girl understands what kind of math he's talking about.
  • 169 - Bullies Can Be So Mean 2: A group of cubes bully a graph for being "plain". Oddly, the other comic about cube bullies (022) is still online.
  • 170 - Cauchy-Schwartz Inequality: Hermann Schwarz is frustrated that people keep misspelling his name as "Schwarts"
  • 171 - 171: The comic is an empty white rectangle. Caption: "I'm not as clever as Mr Burke".
  • 179 - I really really love lie algebras!: A guy puts a Lie algebra book into his pants.
  • 204 - j: A comic that mocks people who use j instead of i to represent the imaginary unit.
  • 220 - Dirty Physics: A "comic in 11 dimensions", where the dirty stuff is hidden behind the 6th and 9th.
  • 222 - Sesame Street: A The Count parody who can't count.
  • 223 - Terence Tao: A female math cartoonist dreams that Terence Tao, who is coming to give a math lecture, will reveal that he loves her comics and propose to her.
  • 226 - Bayesian Interference: A guy tries to calculate the probability of having sex tonight.
  • 227 - Pranks: Tells you that mathematicians are not much of pranksters.
  • 231 - Addictions: A comic that portrays a mathematician as addicted to math and mentions that it's considered a respectable career.
  • 232 - How much math do you know?: A comic that claims mathematicians think they know practically all of it, when the true amount is about 0.35% of it.
  • 233 - Erdos - Mathematician by day, mathematician by night: A comic about Paul Erdős being weird.
  • 235 - He Loves Me: A mathematician ruins a girl's love fantasy by pointing out that most flowers have an odd number of petals.
  • 262 - Just another day: A guy who incorporates pronic numbers into his routine.
  • 263: Uses the URL of a comic, but is actually examples of math-y T-shirt designs.
  • 266-270 - The adventures of Erdos parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5: Anecdotes about Paul Erdős.
  • 281 - Fun with profs: A story told from the perspective of a new grad student.
  • 287 - The Date Graph: A guy uses a graph to find out how many girls he can date at once without getting caught.
  • 291 - The first time I tried to prove a theorem
  • 300 - Mingle with singles: Einstein, Rényi and Erdős are going to mingle with singles.
  • 304 - PhD blues: A comic that tells you to cope with PhD blues by comparing yourself to those who are dumber.
  • 308 - Guide to being a successful teacher.
  • 321 - Math Halloween Costume Ideas: A list of math-themed Halloween costumes.
  • 334 - How to drive a mathematician crazy: A girl tries the missing dollar riddle on a mathematician. He recognizes the riddle and tries to explain the solution as she starts telling the riddle, but to his frustration, he keeps going.
  • 335 - How to drive a mathematician crazy: Similar to the above, except that the mathematician decides to hide his frustration and play along because "OMG! Boob girl is talking to me!!"
  • 367 - Ow Man: Uses a questionable fraction to explain why a man should always be on top.
  • 380 - How would you respond?: Mike says that he's a mathematician, and the woman says that he can't be a good one because he seems pretty normal.
  • 390 - The Pigeonhole Principle: Lists a few applications of the the pigeonhole principle. The last one is proving infidelity.
  • 397 - Uncommon methods of numerical integration: Integration meets dick jokes.
  • 399 - I hate pi day: A student hates pi day... until he's informed that it includes chocolate pie.
  • 437 - Assymptote: Compares an asymptote to a stripper's ass.
  • 467 - Assistant to the Assistant Managing Editor: Is about the frustrations of some poor guy who has to help prepare a proof for a professor, which turns out to be tricky because of the prof's terrible LaTeX code.
  • 525 - Power Set: Uses the power set to make a threesome joke.
  • 528 - Public Perception: Pokes fun at the public perception of mathematicians.
  • 561 - Video comics #1 and #2: Two video comics. The videos themselves have been deleted from the comic's YouTube channel.
• Schedule Slip: The comic was daily for its first months, but then started to slow down. On January 31, 2012, the author admitted that he hadn't updated "in like FOREVER" (since January 19) and announced a new schedule with one comic a week at summer, and two otherwise. He ended up missing several weeks, including all of June and September 2013. The slip would get worse: 2014 had eleven comics in total, 2015 had ten, 2016 had two (both in January), 2017 had none, and the seven comics from 2018 turned out to be the last.