Dinner guest material?
Funny formula: the sums in ‘The Simpsons’
Simon Singh’s book looks at complex maths gags in Springfield and in ‘Futurama’. So then, why do the Simpsons live at No 742?
Simon Singh: ‘The number of the house in which the Simpsons live is 742 and for ages I couldn’t figure out what it meant.’
In the Simpsons episode “Marge and Homer Turn a Couple Play”, a big screen in Springfield’s baseball stadium asks the crowd to guess the capacity. It gives the options: (a) 8,191, (b) 8,128 and (c) 8,208. Irish Times readers will, of course, recognise that (a) is a “prime number”, (b) is a “perfect number” and (c) is a “narcissistic number”.
In another episode Apu announces he can “recite pi to 40,000 places. The last digit is 1.” Well, the 40,000th decimal place of pi actually is the digit 1. But you knew that.
In Futurama, another cartoon created by Matt Groening, Bender the robot sees the binary number 0101100101 written in blood. He is unconcerned until he sees it reflected in a mirror as 1010011010. He is suddenly terrified. I won’t patronise you by explaining the joke. I’m sure you’ve figured it out for yourself*.
The Simpsons and Futurama are packed with surprisingly complex, throwaway gags about maths. These jokes, says Simon Singh, the Mohawk-haired, Harry Potter-bespectacled author of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, are often only noticed by “about three people”. But the mathematically inclined Simpsons creators don’t care. When writer Eric Kaplan was told a maths gag was too obscure for most viewers, he replied “f*** ’em”.
Singh, a science writer with a PhD in physics, first noticed the maths of The Simpsons while watching “The Last Temptation of Homer”, an episode in which Homer wrote on a blackboard: 3,98712 + 4,36512 = 4,47212, thus apparently solving Fermat’s last theorem. Singh had written a bestselling book on that subject. So he wrote to The Simpsons and Futurama writer David X Cohen, spent time with the writing staff (many of whom also hold maths and physics PhDs) and explored the show’s many maths jokes.
A lightning bolt
Singh has long strived to encourage scientific learning. He’s had a lot of fun doing so. He worked for the BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World. He once took songwriter Katie Melua to task for implying that the universe was 12 billion years old rather than 13.7 billion in her song Nine Million Bicycles (she good-naturedly recorded a new version for him). He also toured a show called Theatre of Science. One set-piece involved him standing in a cage while Tesla coils on either side generated a million volt bolts of lightning.
“Every night the audience would vote on who would go into the cage, me or my colleague [Richard Wiseman],” he says. “It was genuinely dangerous and unpleasant. Lightning ionises the nitrogen in the air, which then forms nitric acid, and you’re inhaling nitric acid fumes as really loud noises are hitting your ears. My future mother-in-law was there, and she voted for me to go into the lightning cage. I’ve never forgiven her for that.”
From the times.. link for the rest of the story for anyone interested:
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/funny-formula-the-sums-in-the-simpsons-1.1584665?page=1
Funny formula: the sums in ‘The Simpsons’
Simon Singh’s book looks at complex maths gags in Springfield and in ‘Futurama’. So then, why do the Simpsons live at No 742?
Simon Singh: ‘The number of the house in which the Simpsons live is 742 and for ages I couldn’t figure out what it meant.’
In the Simpsons episode “Marge and Homer Turn a Couple Play”, a big screen in Springfield’s baseball stadium asks the crowd to guess the capacity. It gives the options: (a) 8,191, (b) 8,128 and (c) 8,208. Irish Times readers will, of course, recognise that (a) is a “prime number”, (b) is a “perfect number” and (c) is a “narcissistic number”.
In another episode Apu announces he can “recite pi to 40,000 places. The last digit is 1.” Well, the 40,000th decimal place of pi actually is the digit 1. But you knew that.
In Futurama, another cartoon created by Matt Groening, Bender the robot sees the binary number 0101100101 written in blood. He is unconcerned until he sees it reflected in a mirror as 1010011010. He is suddenly terrified. I won’t patronise you by explaining the joke. I’m sure you’ve figured it out for yourself*.
The Simpsons and Futurama are packed with surprisingly complex, throwaway gags about maths. These jokes, says Simon Singh, the Mohawk-haired, Harry Potter-bespectacled author of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, are often only noticed by “about three people”. But the mathematically inclined Simpsons creators don’t care. When writer Eric Kaplan was told a maths gag was too obscure for most viewers, he replied “f*** ’em”.
Singh, a science writer with a PhD in physics, first noticed the maths of The Simpsons while watching “The Last Temptation of Homer”, an episode in which Homer wrote on a blackboard: 3,98712 + 4,36512 = 4,47212, thus apparently solving Fermat’s last theorem. Singh had written a bestselling book on that subject. So he wrote to The Simpsons and Futurama writer David X Cohen, spent time with the writing staff (many of whom also hold maths and physics PhDs) and explored the show’s many maths jokes.
A lightning bolt
Singh has long strived to encourage scientific learning. He’s had a lot of fun doing so. He worked for the BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World. He once took songwriter Katie Melua to task for implying that the universe was 12 billion years old rather than 13.7 billion in her song Nine Million Bicycles (she good-naturedly recorded a new version for him). He also toured a show called Theatre of Science. One set-piece involved him standing in a cage while Tesla coils on either side generated a million volt bolts of lightning.
“Every night the audience would vote on who would go into the cage, me or my colleague [Richard Wiseman],” he says. “It was genuinely dangerous and unpleasant. Lightning ionises the nitrogen in the air, which then forms nitric acid, and you’re inhaling nitric acid fumes as really loud noises are hitting your ears. My future mother-in-law was there, and she voted for me to go into the lightning cage. I’ve never forgiven her for that.”
From the times.. link for the rest of the story for anyone interested:
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/funny-formula-the-sums-in-the-simpsons-1.1584665?page=1
