Simpsons Guide to Math

tu-tone writes "The LA times has done an article titled "Simpsons analysts show how math figures into episodes" based off of work done by two professors Andrew Nestler and Sarah J. Greenwald. The work is a Guide to Appearances of Mathematics and Mathematicians on "The Simpsons" . They even gave a talk on it at Harvey Mudd College. It's a fun read." There's a transcript of one of their presentations available.

Comments

Re:Grocery Store Scanner

[WilliamsDA]

No, it does not read "NRA4EVER".

From snpp.com's List of Inquiries & Substantive Answers:

"But the trivia question in The 138th Episode Spectacular said that the cash register read "NRA4EVER". What's going on here?

The trivia questions in The 138th Episode Spectacular are gags made to troll the audience, just like the images of Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, and Sam Simon in the episode are not what those people really look like. The cash register question is a gag referring to the people who have labeled the show as "the most liberal on television" by portraying it as having an ultra-conservative slant. "

On-Line Simpsons Resource, Par Excellence

[LittleGuy]

To check out more references than humanly possible, visit The Simpsons Archive .

Re:Euler's Equation

[Remik]

Math Prof's are #1.

Re:That's not the point

[babbage]

You know, now that you mention it my brother (now a college junior) did exactly this in high school. I forget what the impetus for it was -- I'll have to ask next time I see him -- but he and a classmate did a presentation on the physics of the Simpsons in the form of a lesson to younger students. At first I thought it was a little silly (in a good way mind you :), but it seems like he made all the same sorts of points that you did: the show has been around forever, and has all kinds of good references to scientific & mathematical material in there.

Still, my favorite "damn the writers of the Simpsons are over-educated genuses" gag is from one of the old Halloween episodes, in which they re-created Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." If you'll recall, the bird in that show was drawn with Bart's head, so Bart = Raven. Look up the name Bart in a baby book and you'll find that it's the nickname for one of two longer names: Bartholemew, and (much less commonly of course) Bartram (or is it Bertram? I forget the spelling, it's been a while now...). And if you look up Bartram, you'll find that it's an Old English word referring to a person that handles ...ravens. [Kind of the same way that a falconer is a person that keeps & takes care of falcons, a ravener or "bartram" is a person that keeps ravens.] Now this is more than a little esoteric, and it could well be a coincidence (they had to get Bart in there somewhere, right?), but considering how often little gags like this crop up my bet is that it was deliberate. And my guess is that, of all the millions of people that watch the Simpsons, and of all the dozens that know how to speak Old English, there had to be no more than a handful of people that watched that episode, got the joke, realized that millions of others would have totally missed it, and laughed their damn heads off.... :)

Ever since I came across that, I've come to believe more and more strongly that Simpsons is our modern day Shakespeare. This gag is at least on par with Hamlet's "country matters" line in cleverness, and they manage to do it all the time. Will the show be remembered for as long or as fondly as Shakespeare? Who knows, but it could well happen and I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Fermat's Last Theorem

[Yoda2]

If you're interested in Fermat's Last Theorem, Fermat's Enigma is a fairly interesting and easy read. It covers both history on Fermat and Andrew Wiles who finally proved the theorem in 1993/1994.

Re:Fermats last theorem

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

However, Fermat did not have a computer

True...

and he was wrong.

Well, Andrew Wiles will have issues with you, and most of the math community agress with him, I believe

For powers of 3 and 4, fermat has been proven wrong by computers already.

Um, no. Fermat's Last Theorem was the statement that

x^n + y^n = z^n

has no solution where x, y, and z are all integers, if n>3.

To disprove Fermat's Theorem, all you would need to do would be to find a triplet of integers that obeys the equation above. Computers proved that for n < 12 (IIRC), there were none. But that doesn't prove the Theorem and (of course) fails to disprove it.

I think you confused the sense of the Theorem, perhaps because it is phrased negatively.

Re:Fermats last theorem

[markmoss]

It's fairly easy to check Fermat's theorem to finite values of x, y, and n: Say, checking everything up to x, y 2000 and n 15 ought to run in a few hours. (Hint: you cannot use floating point -- so you've got to program multiplication and addition for _extremely_ long integers.)

But how in heck could a computer check this for n=4 and _all_ values of x, y, and z?

OTOH, as the transcript pointed out, you don't need to know how far Fermat's theorem has been tested to see that 1782^12 + 1841^12 = 1922^12 is wrong. Multiplying even numbers by even numbers always gives an even number. The equation is wrong, no arithmetic required. Multiplying odd numbers by odd numbers always gives an odd number. Add even to odd, and you get odd. Make it 1921^12, and we might need a forty-digit calculator to be absolutely _sure_ this wasn't the disproof of Fermat's last theorem...

Re:Biblical Pi

[MindStalker]

sorry about the yelling earlier, was having a bad day. (I'm flamebait and he's insightful? :)
Anyways, http://www.yfiles.com/pi.html
any try to ignore the religious references.

Re:Biblical Pi

[RoninM]

That site is perhaps the worst bit of religious claptrap I've read in a long time. Not only is it completely inane and arbitrary (on the order of those ridiculous Bible/Torah codes), but it ignores historical fact in purporting that modern editions of the Bible have not been altered by years upon years of scribeswork. Here's a thunderstorm for this kook's parade: spelling systems have significantly altered over time, so as the books have been scribed, they have often underwent correction (or, to use a lighter term, translation) for modern usage/dialect. All this without even getting into the likely errors of an age short on the infrastructure to ensure common spellings. Then we have the footnote that not only have spellings often changed, but some of the text has suffered greater edits.

What is worth more than mathematical ad-hockery is to note that the Bible is simply incorrect, here, for whatever reason (whether it's because the passage was only intended as a casual, imprecise description, was transcribed wrong, etc. doesn't matter). One is also free to point out that most arguments that use this fact to jump to some sweeping, grand conclusion are quite invalid.