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."

Comments

Maple is good at this

[jfern]

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.

Why NASA?

[Grendel Drago]

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