Math on the Simpsons

The topic I will talk about today is „Math on the Simpsons“. I‘m sure taht everybody knows about the show called „The simpsons“. It‘s a show which represents a typical American famuly. Firstly, why we are able to find math nerd jokes on the Simpsons?

The deal is that there are several past math-geeks among the writers of the show. Some of the writers have math degrees in the best known universities, for example, Harvard, but they gave up their speciallities and became a comedy show script writers. However, they haven‘t forgotten what they‘ve learnt and they put a little part of theirselves in this, from the first sight seem to be dumb yet funny show, and now it is full of mathematical theorems and nerd jokes.

The first epizode is called „Marge and Homer Turn a Couple play“. Marge and Homer try to help baseball star Buck Mitchell and his wife Tabitha Vixx, who are experiencing marital difficulties. The epizode climaxes with Tabitha appearing on the Jumbo Vision screen at the Springfield stadium, where publicity proclaims her love for Buck. Just before she appears on the screen, it displays a question that asks the baseball fans to guess the attendance.

The screen displays three multiple choice options; 8128, 8208 and 8191. The digits might seem to arbitrary and innocuous, buti n fact they represent a perfecta number, a narcissistic number and a Mersenne prime.

8128 is called a perfecta number, because its divisors add up to the number itself. The smallest perfecta number is 6. The second is 28, the third 496 and the fourth one is 8128. The 17th-century French mathematician pointed out: „Perfect numbers, like perfecta men, are very rare.“

8208 is a narcissistic number because it contains 4 digits and raising each of these digits to the 4th power generates four numbers that add to itself. Even though we have the infinity amount of numbers, there are fewer than 100 exhibit narcissism.

8191 is a prime number, because it has no divisors other than 1 and the number itself and it is labelled a Mersenne prime because 17th-century mathematician Marin Mersenne spotted that 8191 was equal to. More generally, Mersenne primes fit the pettern were n is any prime number.

The second epizode I will talk about is called „the Wizard of Evergreen Terrace“ in which Homer tries to become an inventor. Ino ne scene, we see himm busily scribbling equations on a blackboard, One of the equations relates to the mass of the Higgs boson, another concers cosmology ant the bottom line explores the geometry of doughnuts. But the second one appears to be counterexample to Fermat‘s last theorem.

17th- century French mathematician called Pierre de Fermat believed that it was impossible to find numbers thet fitted particular equation, and he left a note proclaiming thet he had a proof of this fact, but he nerver wrote down the proof itself, badass. For more than 300 years, mathematicians tried and failed to rediscover Fermats proof. Eventually, in the 1980s Professor Andrew Wiles confirmed that Fermat was right, inasmuch as the equation has no solution. Yet, Homer‘s blackboard proves the opposite. But although the numbers appear to work on a calculator, a closer inspection reveals that this is a so-called near miss solution. The left side of the equation being 0,000000002% larger than the right side.

And lastly, the epizode called „Bye, bye, nerdie“. As you saw, professor Frink is struggling to bring the conference to order. Frustrated and desperate, frink eventually calls out: „pi is exactly three“

Suddenly, the noise stops. Professor Frink‘s idea worked, because hhe correctly realised that declaring an exact value for pi would stun an audience of geeks into silence. Pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of decimal places.