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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."
Its not their fault that you don't get it.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
-William Brendel
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.
NO FAIR! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
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.
i believe that episode aired in 1993... the internet was a different place back then.
An article about the Simpsons, and 19 of the first 20 replies are about pi and the other one's about how hot a blue-haired, yellow-skinned cartoon character is.
Most of my extended family are hard line Catholic republicans, they not only voted for Bush, but did so with joy in their hearts. They don't listen to much of anything anyone tried to tell them about either alternate viewpoints or even their own beliefs.
However, many of my younger cousins watch South Park and/or the Simpsons and are exposed to ideas which contradict their own, they may not immediately see it, but they are exposed to them without automatically tuning out. This is why these shows are great, because the gags allow a message to get across to people who don't listen to other sources.
Professor Frink: Gentleman please.... can I just.... your attention please.... ahem. PI IS EQUAL TO 3!
Audience: *Gasp*
In ninth grade algebra, I walk into class and the teacher had put an infinity symbol on the whiteboard. I, being the smart ass I am says,
"Mr. Dewey, who killed eight?"
Mr. Dewey says without missing a beat,
"Pi, It's an irrational number."
(Feel free to throw tomatoes at my post. But I did warn you that it was corny, plus this is as humorous as I get at 2am EDT.)
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
mmmmmmmmm, pi.
I am so smart!
I am so smart!
S-M-R-T!
I mean S-M-A-R-T!
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.
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
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.
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
[Pi has] 40,000 digits?
Yes it does. Here's all 40,000 of them (in base 10):
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
0
fuck you shithead
You're the one at NASA who printed out the 40,000 digits?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I recall a joke by comedian Steven Wright (I think):
I went to a math conference recently, and the hotel at the conference labelled all the rooms with math symbols.
Mine was Pi. Easy enough to find, but it took FOREVER to dial on the hotel phone system.