Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Math with Cohen and Groening

Posted by Zonk on from the learning-is-fun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While math on The Simpsons and math on Futurama has been covered by Slashdot before, new background on some of the scientific references is covered in a long transcription of A Futurama Math Conversation with David X Cohen and a short summary of a math club talk to Matt Groening and a number of writers from both shows. Some amusing tidbits are on these pages - for example, when the Simpsons writers contacted NASA for the 40,000th digit of pi, NASA actually sent them a printout of all 40,000 digits."

8 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Why NASA? by dj245 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't know why they needed NASA for that. Pifast will spit out the first 40,000th digits in a very short time on modern computers. A million is a reasonable benchmarking number for that program. Finding the 40,000th digit in the text file takes longer than calculating it.

    --
    Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
    1. Re:Why NASA? by IvyMike · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't know why they needed NASA for that. Pifast will spit out the first 40,000th digits in a very short time on modern computers.

      That was in episode 9F20, which aired 5/6/93. No Pifast, no google; heck, NCSA Mosaic wasn't even around until June.

    2. Re:Why NASA? by adpowers · · Score: 4, Informative

      And these were techy guys.

      I read most of the article. A few years later (1995), David X Cohen wrote a small program to find numbers that fudge to make it look like Fermat's Last Theorem is false (near misses). He used the program to find three numbers that made the equation roughly equal, as in, if viewed on a calculator will low resolution (only showing 8-9 digits), they answers would appear to be equal. Here is one of the two equations used in the Simpsons:

      1782^12 + 1841^12 =1922^12

      Anyway, my point was that they knew how to write code.

      Andrew

  2. Funny? by tepples · · Score: 2, Informative

    that's why NASA's annual paper budget is $17.3 million.

    $17.3 million? That's stretching it, even for a joke. With about 80 digits per line, 50 lines per page, and 40,000 digits per document, how many trees do ten pages kill?

  3. Re:simpsons by wbren · · Score: 2, Informative
    Hey, i'm a fat slob that gets bomb-ass pussy
    Yeah sure, buddy. You and every other slashdotter here. :-)
    --
    -William Brendel
  4. Re:Ah, so... by fbform · · Score: 3, Informative
    http://3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716 9399375105820974944592.com/.

    --
    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
  5. Re:they got the digit from two sources by IvyMike · · Score: 2, Informative

    I never knew that the simpsons also asked NASA for the the 40,000th digit of Pi. But I've known for a while that they asked David Bailey for it as well

    Looks like David Bailey worked for NASA in 1993.

  6. Re:Too easy to disprove by Zarhan · · Score: 2, Informative

    The program is at http://www.mathsci.appstate.edu/~sjg/futurama/near miss.html And yes, the later version checks for parity.