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

Math...

[ackthpt]

It embiggens the mind of the smallest man.

What? 'Math' is a perfectly cromulent word!

D'OH

[Anonymous Coward]

marge's hair contains a hidden fractal

Euler's Equation

[Remik]

In the (in)famous 3-D Simpsons when Homer wanders into the freaky 3-D realm, the equation floating in the background [e^(pi*i)=-1] is infact a form of Euler's equation, one of the most important equations in math. In it's traditional form, [e^(pi*i)]+1=0 it relates the 5 most important constants in math.

Re:Euler's Equation

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, did you notice the hexadecimal string in 3D land, "46 72 69 6E 6B 20 72 75 6C 65 73 21", decodes as "Frink rules!" in ASCII?

That's more funny than a stupid "how many gallons in a pound" joke, IMO.

Re:Euler's Equation

[Uri]

In it's traditional form, [e^(pi*i)]+1=0, it relates the 5 most important constants in math...

...and is beaten only by 0*i*pi*e = 1+-1

Re:Euler's Equation

[glyph42]

In it's traditional form, [e^(pi*i)]+1=0 it relates the 5 most important constants in math.

Ooh! Not only that, but it uses each one exactly once. Also, it uses each of the basic arithmetic operators exactly once: +, *, ^, =.

Re:Euler's Equation

[PhotoGuy]

In the (in)famous 3-D Simpsons when Homer wanders into the freaky 3-D realm, the equation floating in the background [e^(pi*i)=-1] is infact a form of Euler's equation, one of the most important equations in math. In it's traditional form, [e^(pi*i)]+1=0 it relates the 5 most important constants in math.

Why do I tend to believe that the math jokes in that 3D sequence were injected by the geeks (and I use that term respectfully) who did the rendering, rather than the writers. Dunno, there were a few other "in jokes" rendering-wise, that made me think most of the visual math humour in that sequence were done by the company that did the rendering. Could be wrong, though.

There certainly is a lot of other good math humour in the show, tho'

-me

That article was too long

[sg3000]

My attention span isn't long enough to read the whole article. Damn TV! You've ruined my imagination! Just like you've ruined my ability to ... my ability to ...

[turns on Itchy and Scratchy]

So I'm sure you've all heard about...

[flyingV]

... Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics?

... and physics too ...

[spoonist]

In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

- Homer Jay Simpson

No short supply of mathematical references.

[thesolo]

The Simpsons, as anyone who has seen even half of a season's worth of episodes knows, is full of constant social commentary, and many things get repeated. However, their math jokes always make me laugh, and never seem to get stale, IMHO. (Bill Amend's "Foxtrot" is the same way.)

Several episodes besides those mentioned in the article contain mathematical formulas, etc. In the episode where Jay Sherman (of The Critic fame) comes to Springfield (the episode is entitled "A Star is Burns", #2F31 for anyone who cares), Homer has to decide which short movie made by fellow Springfieldians to vote on. Homer says "I've got some serious thinking to do", and then the camera pans to a shot of his brain, where two monkeys are doing natural logs and derivatives on a chalkboard!! (This of course was also a play on a previous brain-shot where two monkeys were doing nothing but picking fleas from each other)

They even manage to work in some references into those Butterfinger Shorts. My personal favorite was in a commercial for Butterfinger B.B.s, Bart's math book is entitled "Math For Underachievers"! Lisa tries helping him with math by asking "If you have 15 BB's, and I take 5, what do you have left?" Bart aptly replies "One less sister!" and raises a fist into the air. Even their shameless ads make me smile. ;)

Calculus

[loydcc]

Derivitive of R cubed. rdrr. I think it was in episode 2.

That's not the point

[kannen]

They weren't talking about the Simpsons as a means of any serious sort of study, they were talking about the Simpsons as a means of making their classes fun.

Their argument is this: for those in college right now, the Simpsons has been on television for almost all of their lives. This year's freshmen were in 1st GRADE when the Simpsons first came on the air. And, these kids LOVE the Simpsons. Lucky for Math professors, a wide range of mathematical topics are covered within the Simpsons. So, if you want to connect with your students, try finding a Simpsons clip that is connected to your current topic and use that as a launch pad for in class discussion.

I think you have to give these guys props, because they are actually trying to break through the wall that is between the professor and the average student so that the student might actually become interested in mat. Wow. Professors who care! This is cool.

Re:That's not the point

[rnd()]

has any subject ever seemed boring to you at first? If not, then you would not have benefitted from the teaching methods described.

If you have been bored, you will understand the importance of context in how something is presented. Simply showing a Simpson's clip won't necessarily break through any walls, but showing the clip and explaining why it is funny or relevant may just do so. Plus, if it wakes up the class and enlivens the discussion, everyone will benefit. People don't learn in a vacuum. Learning is a social act and is influenced deeply by culture.

Of course, the more you enjoy and appreciate maths, the funnier the references are, so I don't really know where you're coming from with your criticism.

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.

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 .

Chemistry too

[loydcc]

I remember a commercial where Homer gets smart and lectures at some prestegious university on the quantum super donut. In the background there are Lewis formulas drawn on the chalk board. After careful scrutiny of a paused tape I can say that the structures would never exist in nature or otherwise. Carbon cannot have 5 bonds. Oxygen must have 2 bonds.

Also "proves" one important complexity result

[Goonie]

If you watch that episode carefully you'll notice that the equation P=NP floating around. Whether this assertion (which, translated, is the question "is the set of decision problems defined in a certain way (roughly "easy to solve") the same as another set of decision problems defined in another way (roughly "easy to verify a solution, but possibly very hard to get a solution")) is true or not is the most famous unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. It's almost certainly not true, but proving it's not has turned out to be a bit of a doozy, to say the least.

I think this basically indicates that the Simpsons writers and animators are just as geeky as the /. readership.

let users mod up rejected submissions.

[Anonymous Coward]

a review of the past two days of news on slashdot.

news that hasn't made it:
-flexible ceramics (hybrid polymers) created using nanoscale chemistry at cornell
-a 1mm microscope that can examine individual molecules from within a cell developed at uc berkeley
-nasa and purdue announce serious investment of time and money on advanced life support systems which will likely be the basis for extraterrestrial colonization
-#1 site critical of scientology yanked from google

what has made it:
-resident evil movie review
-simpsons guide to math
-self heating can
-"please help me start my project because i am too stupid to figure it out myself" ask slashdot

Most likely limited to early seasons

[Masem]

After season 7, there was a major shakeup in the production of the show, and this is typically where most fans of the early season Simpsons say when the show went downhill. I would also suspsect that if one were to look at the references cited in this lecture, they'd find a bulk of them in the early seasons as well. (Those cited in the LATimes story, for example, are mostly early seasons). Or, a better comparison is to look at the type of math references. The 'difficulty' of the cited math references (arithmatic being low, calculus being high) would decline after the first few seasons, and today's episodes would have very low difficulty math, if any.

While approaching the question from a very different direction, I think this study/lecture helps to suggest that there was a significant change in the aim of the show after Season 7. Instead of appealing to the male 18-30 block, with heavy emphasis on college students, the show now is trying to appeal to a younger audience as well as more diverse; the number of these more intelligent gags have dropped drastically since that point, in addition to other noticable changes. I would think it would be hard pressed to find a non-trivial math reference in any recent episode of late, but more than enough pop-culture references are still there.

No..No.. [e^(pi * j)] + 1 = 0

[bdoliver]

To clarify the Electrical Engineering stance on the subject its [e^(pi * j)] + 1 = 0.
In the words of a former professor:

• "All those math folks out there just don't know that "i" is already in use as a notation for current."

I am sure that moderation of this will be a direct result of the number of EE's with points at the momment. But its "j" damn it! jaaaayyyy!

Re:No..No.. [e^(pi * j)] + 1 = 0

[cgray4]

Heh, look, it's an engineer lecturing about math. Next he'll tell us the exact value of pi.

Also, isn't current denoted by "I"? It is in physics. Maybe engineers just mess with everyone's notation.

Re:No jokes about maths?

[the_consumer]

Why didn't the statistician have a significant other?

He was satisfied with 5 significant digits.

The Metric System and Grandpa's Car

[rjthomas61]

>Marge: Now I know you haven't liked some of my past suggestions, like switching to the metric system.
>Grampa: The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!

Let's see....
40 rods/Hogshead x
1 mile/320 rods x
1 Hogshead/63 gallons =
0.00198 miles/gallon or
504 gallons/mile

Perhaps Grampa drives an SUV?

Different interpretation of 3.14159265... joke

[pomakis]

I think the writer of that article interpreted this joke differently than I did:

In Greenwald's favorite "Simpsons" math moment, Homer and Marge Simpson are considering sending their daughter Lisa to a school for the gifted.

As the camera pans, two young girls playing the game of patty-cake recite the following playground chant: "Cross my heart and hope to die / Here's the digits that make pi / 3.1415926535897932384..." and the camera pans away.

The joke, of course, is that the digits that make pi -- a circle's circumference divided by its diameter -- continue infinitely. The writers are clearly aware that pi is what's called an irrational number -- one that cannot be expressed in terms of the quotient of two integers in lowest terms. And to "get it," the viewers have to understand that it means you can never say what pi is exactly, in the same way you can say what 5 is.

I don't think the joke is "Ha ha! They're going to go on forever!". I think it's merely "Ha ha! They're so geeky that they memorized the first umpteen digits of pi for fun!".

Re:Different interpretation of 3.14159265... joke

[Indras]

I think it's merely "Ha ha! They're so geeky that they memorized the first umpteen digits of pi for fun!"

Nobody 3.14159 really 2653589 does 7932384 that, 62643383 do 27950288 they?

Deep Space Homer

[birder]

One of my favs:

Tom: Now let's look at the crew a little.

Man 2: They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed "the Three Musketeers". Heh heh heh --

Tom: And we laugh legitimately. There's a mathematician, a different _kind_ of mathematician, and a statistician.

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:why only math'?

[generic-man]

Lisa looks at Comic Book Guy's shirt reading "C:\DOS / C:\DOS\RUN / RUN\DOS\RUN". She reads it aloud.
Lisa: Only one person in a million would find that funny.
Frink: Yes, we call that the "Dennis Miller ratio." M'hey.

Simpsons explained Black holes to me...

[NanoGator]

There was a show on Black Holes on the Discovery Channel one day. They used the 3D episode of the Simpsons to illustrate how a black hole works.

I haveta admit, I carried away a lot more about black holes because of that episode. For example, I had always heard that 'time and space are curved', but could never really picture it until they explained it using footage from that show.

Us right brained people don't like books a whole lot. Math equations put us into screensaver mode. So when we get a visual like that, it suddenly clicks into place.

Kudos to Discovery Channel and the Simpsons for giving me the foundation ability to understand the more sophisticated theories about time and space.

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...

The difference between today and tomorrow.

[NanoGator]

Okay... so something interesting to YOU didn't make it. I'll give you the Nasa one, but I have to side with Slashdot's decision on the rest of them.

Simpsons: Fun, interesting to talk about with my friends. Flexible ceramics? ZZzzz. How many years before we see something result from that?

Resident Evil movie: tempted to see that, Slashdot saved me money today. 1mm Microscope: Woopie. We'll see results from that in what, 5-10 years?

Self heating can: lots of us bachelors don't like to cook. This could also be quite useful in survival gear. It's going to be out SOON. (According to their marketing brocure...). The Google one you mentioned made it.

Please help my project? Due date NOW.

See the pattern? I'm not in any way saying that ultimately the news you suggested is less important, but the big difference is time. If something is going to happen years from now, then it has lower prescedence on what's happening today.

Re:Biblical Pi

[belloc]

Actually, according to the bible, the value of pi is 3 exactly. Check out 1 Kings 7:23...

What 1 Kings 7:23 says:

"Then he made the molten sea; it was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference."

What it doesn't say:

"...a mathematical circle whose diameter is ten point zero zero cubits will have a circumference of thirty point zero zero cubits, thus saith the LORD, and those who tried to think otherwise were smited down by the tyrannical God of the Old Testament...."

1. The passage is describing the construction of a molten freaking sea, it's not a mathematical treatise on the nature of the circle.

2. Not only is this not a mathematical treatise, it's not even an engineering plan or construction document. It's just a loose description. "Thirty cubits" isn't a bad ballpark estimation of 31.4159... cubits when you're just describing the thing in layman's terms, especially when you don't know whether the "ten cubits from brim to brim" is an inside diameter, outside diameter, or center-wall to center-wall diameter.

3. Even if this passage were an engineering plan, no constructed, material "circle" is ever going to have a circumference of exactly pi times its diameter. There will always be a discrepancy by which it will be off, plus or minus, depending on the matter and its application, and the technological ability to fabricate it. The dimensions of a molten sea, for example, can be expected be off by more than, say, dimensinons of optical mirror components.

4. Sheesh. People will say anything.

Belloc

Calculus is borderline insanity.

[darkonc]

This reminds me of one of my (original) math jokes... It came from two semi-related incidents: Debunking a 2=1 math proof that our math teacher threw up for us in grade 10, and then learning about how calculus works.

The 2=1 proof depended on creating a non-obvious reference to 0/0=1, and then reducing down to 2=1.

Looking at it for a while, I relized that 0/0=x is the same as solving for 0=x*0 ... In other words, X can be anything (integer, real , complex...).

In first-year honors calculus, I realized that calculus is based on the same kind of construct, except for that you're solving for the limit of a/b=x as a and b approach zero -- in other words, dancing with the devil of 0/0.

The moral of my story:

Calculus is based on the fact that 0/0 can be anything you want, depending on how you approach it.

Any references to prior art (I first came up with that pun in 1980)?

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.