The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
Page 22
The Simpsons and Mathematics
www.simpsonsmath.com
http://homepage.smc.edu/nestler_andrew/SimpsonsMath.htm
The Simpsons Activity Sheets
http://mathsci2.appstate.edu/~sjg/simpsonsmath/worksheets.html
Futurama and Mathematics
http://www.futuramamath.com
http://mathsci2.appstate.edu/~sjg/futurama
There are various other sites that offer general information about The Simpsons and Futurama. Some of the sites contain sections discussing mathematical references.
The Simpsons
http://www.thesimpsons.com/
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Simpsons_Wiki
http://www.snpp.com/
Futurama
http://theinfosphere.org/Main_Page
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Futurama_Wiki
http://www.gotfuturama.com/
Picture Credits
Provided by Mike Bannon.
Provided by Al Jean.
Provided by David X. Cohen.
Provided by David X. Cohen.
“THE SIMPSONS” TM and © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All Rights Reserved.
“THE SIMPSONS” TM and © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All Rights Reserved.
Courtesy of Mike Reiss.
“THE SIMPSONS” TM and © 1990 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All Rights Reserved.
“FUTURAMA” © 2002 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All Rights Reserved.
Courtesy of Patric Verrone.
“FUTURAMA” © 2002 Twentieth Century Fox Television. All Rights Reserved.
All other images in the book were created by Nicole Gastonguay and Na Kim.
Endnotes
1. In 1951, Newsweek reported that nerd was a derogatory term gaining popularity in Detroit. In the 1960s, students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute preferred the spelling knurd, which was drunk spelled backward—the implication being that knurds are the opposite of party animals. However, with the emergence of nerd pride over the past decade, the term is now embraced by mathematicians and others of their ilk. Similarly, geek is a label to be admired, as demonstrated by the popularity of geek chic and a headline in Time magazine in 2005: “The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth.”
2. Readers with a rusty knowledge of calculus may need to be reminded of the following general rule: The derivative of y = rn is dy/dr = n × rn – 1. Readers with no knowledge of calculus can be reassured that their blind spot will not hinder their understanding of the rest of the chapter.
3. Incidentally, and coincidentally, Gardner was living on Euclid Avenue when he replied that Euclid had the answer to Reiss’s question.
4. Hints for those brave enough to do the calculation: Do not forget that E = mc2 and remember to convert the result to GeV energy units.
5. I should point out that this is a story that is close to my heart, as I have written a book and directed a BBC documentary about Fermat’s last theorem and Andrew Wiles’s proof. Coincidentally, during a brief stint at Harvard University, Wiles lectured Al Jean, who went on to write for The Simpsons.
6. We can recast this joke in a more mathematical framework by defining Pr as the retail price, Pw as the wholesale price, and N as the number of watermelons that the truck can carry. The profit ($) formula is $ = N × (Pr - Pw). Hence, if Pw = Pr, then buying a bigger truck and increasing N clearly makes no difference to the profit.
7. These puns, gags, and shaggy-dog stories have been handed down from one generation of geeks to the next, which means that the names of the writers have sadly been lost in the mists of time (or the writers have understandably sought anonymity).
8. I have, of course, looked at my own credentials. My Erdős number is 4 and my Bacon number is 2, which puts me on a par with Jeff Westbrook. Moreover, I also appear to have a Sabbath number, which is generated as a result of musical collaborations linking me to a member of the rock band Black Sabbath. Indeed, according to the Erdős Bacon Sabbath Project (http://ebs.rosschurchley.com), I have an Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number of 10, giving me the world’s eighth-lowest Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number, on a par with Richard Feynman, among others!
9. Remember, Poindexter was the boy genius from Felix the Cat who inspired the name poindextrose, given to the pheromone discovered by Lisa in the episode “Bye, Bye, Nerdie” (2010).
10. Incidentally, when Lisa is in Moe’s Tavern talking to Professor Frink, he uses his laptop to show her an online video of Bill James, voiced by the real Bill James.
11. Larry Flynt is an American publisher of pornography. An assassination attempt in 1978 left him paralyzed from the waist down and wheelchair-bound.
12. The musical is a spin-off from The Itchy and Scratchy Show, a cartoon watched by Bart and Lisa. The origins of Itchy and Scratchy can be traced back to a young Matt Groening watching Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, in which there is a scene showing the puppies watching television. Decades later, Groening wanted to recreate the idea of a cartoon within a cartoon.
13. There is a mass public participation project to find even larger Mersenne primes. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) allows participants to download free software and then run it on their home computers while idling. Each machine then sifts through its batch of allotted numbers searching for a record-breaking prime. If you take part, then you might be lucky enough to discover the next record-breaking Mersenne prime.
14. Discrete Applied Mathematics 58, no. 3 (1995): 239–52.
15. “On the Problem of Sorting Burnt Pancakes,” Discrete Applied Mathematics 61, no. 2 (1995): 105–20.
16. The culprit was probably David Mirkin, an ex-engineer with an interest in mathematics. He was executive producer on this episode and two others in 1993 (“The Last Temptation of Homer” and “Rosebud”), which all contain references to The Wizard of Oz.
17. In case you have forgotten it, you can look up Bart’s theorem in a paper titled “Periodic Strongly Continuous Semigroups,” by Professor Harm Bart, published in Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata 115, no. 1 (1977): 311–18.
18. The formula contains the ! symbol, which represents the factorial operation. This is best explained by example: 1! = 1, 2! = 2 × 1, 3! = 3 × 2 × 1, and so on.
19. Google is also fascinated by another number. In 2011, its opening bid for a batch of patents was $1,902,160,540, which is $1 billion multiplied by Brun’s constant (B2). This number is the sum of the reciprocals of all the twin primes, i.e., primes that are separated by just one even number.
Therefore, B2 = (1/3 + 1/5) + (1/5 + 1/7) + (1/11+ 1/13) + ... = 1.902160540....
20. Machin’s formula for evaluating the value of π relied on the following observations: 1/4 π = 4 cot -1 (5) – cot -1 (239). Here, cot represents the cotangent function. This is not an infinite series, but it can be converted into a very efficient one via a so-called Taylor series expansion.
21. Bailey helped to invent the spigot algorithm for finding the digits of π. A spigot is a type of tap, and a spigot algorithm generates answers in a taplike fashion, which means that π is calculated drip by drip, digit by digit. The spigot algorithm can be tuned to generate any particular digit with perfect accuracy, so you might then think that it would be easy for Bailey to tune his algorithm to deliver the forty-thousandth digit. Unfortunately, Bailey’s algorithm only works in hexadecimal (base 16), not decimal (base 10).
22. The awarding of the Nobel Prize is witnessed by Frink’s resurrected father, who is voiced by the legendary comic actor Jerry Lewis. This resulted in a voice circle. Lewis based his voice for Frink Sr. on Hank Azaria’s voice for Frink Jr., which in turn was based on Lewis’s lead character in The Nutty Professor.
23. This rule belongs to a branch of mathematics known as modular arithmetic. As well as being very useful in the context of cryptography, modular arithmetic also plays a vital role in several other areas of mathematical research, including the proof of Fermat’s last theor
em.
24. The episode’s title is a twist on Two-Lane Blacktop, a cult 1971 movie about two street racers.
25. Wash Bucket is a robotic mop bucket who has appeared in four episodes.
26. Emperor Nikolai is the robot emperor of Robo-Hungary.
27. The Wronskian is used in the study of differential equations and is named after the nineteenth-century French-Polish mathematician Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński.
Note on the Author
SIMON SINGH received his PhD in particle physics from the University of Cambridge. A former BBC producer, he directed a BAFTA Award–winning documentary about Fermat’s last theorem and wrote a bestselling book on the same subject. His best seller The Code Book was the basis for the Channel Four series The Science of Secrecy. His third book, Big Bang, was also a best seller, and Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine, written with Edzard Ernst, did not sell very well at all, but it did cause quite a fuss.
Singh lives in London.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem (US edition)
Fermat’s Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World’s Greatest Minds for 358 Years (UK edition)
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography
Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe
Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2013 by Simon Singh
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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This book has not been approved, licensed, or sponsored by any entity or person involved in creating or producing The Simpsons™, the film, or the TV series. The Simpsons ® is a registered trademark of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, © 2013 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Nor has this book been approved, licensed, or sponsored by any entity or person involved in creating or producing Futurama™, the TV series. Futurama ® is a registered trademark of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
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