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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."

4 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Instead of NASA... by guyfromindia · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They could have quickly called Daniel Tammet http://www.spring.org.uk/2005/05/daniel-tammet-boy -with-incredible.htm
    Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. He can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations at breakneck speeds.
    He can figure out cube roots quicker than a calculator and recall pi to 22,514 decimal places.
    :-)

  2. Maple is good at this by jfern · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It just took about 20 seconds to evaluate
    evalf(Pi,40000).

    In case anyone cares:
    The 40000th digit is a 5.
    The 40000th digit after the decimal is a 1.

  3. Why NASA? by Grendel+Drago · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why'd they have to contact NASA? And don't give me any crap about it being 1993; Project Gutenberg's pi to a million digits was released before 1993.

    --grendel drago

    --
    Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
  4. they got the digit from two sources by blonde+rser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 (Bailey is one of the B's from BBP numbers... which is the formula to calculate an arbitrary digit of Pi in Hex). You can actually see a picture of the fax that the simpsons sent him on the 4th page of this pdf http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/personal/jborwein/pi-slides .pdf
    I always thought that it was pretty cool that they took the trouble to just find out what the right digit was but now I know they actually decided to confirm it as well. That's pride in ones craft right there.