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Math with Cohen and Groening
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."
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.
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