The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets Free

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You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons and its sister show Futurama without ever realising that they contain enough maths to form an entire university course. Inevitably, its global appeal and enduring popularity have prompted academics who tend to overanalyze everything to identify the subtext of the series and to ask some profound questions. Do the spats between Bart and Lisa The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets something beyond mere sibling bickering? Are the writers of The Simpsons using the residents of Springfield to explore political or social controversies? One group of intellectuals authored a text arguing that The Simpsons essentially provides viewers with a weekly philosophy lecture. This collection of essays uses examples from the series to explore issues such as addiction, lobotomies, and evolutionary psychology. By contrast, Mark I. This is surprising, because many characters 1. Many vicars The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets priests agree, and several have based sermons on the moral dilemmas that face the Simpson family. Even President George H. Bush claimed to have exposed the real message behind The Simpsons. He believed that The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets series was designed to display the worst possible social values. The truth is that many of the writers of The Simpsons are deeply in love with numbers, and their ultimate desire The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets to drip-feed morsels of mathematics into the subconscious minds of viewers. In other words, for more than two decades we have been tricked into watching an animated introduction to everything from calculus to geometry, from p to game theory, and from infinitesimals to infinity. All of this is embedded within a narrative that explores the complexities of higher-dimensional geometry. In fact, some have PhDs and have even held senior research positions in academia and industry. We will meet Cohen and his colleagues during the course of the book. In the meantime, here is a list of degrees for five of the nerdiest writers: J. Insome of these writers helped create a sister series titled Futurama, which is set one thousand years in the future. Not surprisingly, this science fiction scenario allowed them to explore mathematical themes in even greater depth, so the latter chapters of this book. This includes the first piece of genuinely innovative and bespoke mathematics to have been created solely for the purposes of a comedy storyline. However, I will not document every exhibit in the Simpsonian Museum of Mathematics, as this would mean including far more than one hundred separate examples. In each case, you will see how the writers have used the characters to explore the universe of numbers. Be there or be a regular quadrilateral. In the s, students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute preferred the spelling knurd, which was drunk spelled backward—the implication being that knurds are the opposite of party animals. However, with the emergence of nerd pride over the past decade, the term is now The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by mathematicians and others of their ilk. Brooks, a legendary director, producer, and screenwriter who had been responsible for classic television shows such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Taxi. Just a couple of years earlier, Brooks had also won three Academy Awards as producer, director, and writer of Terms of Endearment. Brooks wanted to talk to Groening The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets contributing to The Tracey Ullman Show, which would go on to become one of the first big hits on the newly formed Fox network. The show consisted of a series of comedy sketches starring the British entertainer Tracey Ullman, and the producers wanted some animated shorts to act as bridges between these sketches. While sitting in reception, waiting to meet Brooks, Groening considered the offer he was about to receive. Selling Binky to Fox seemed like a betrayal of the cartoon rabbit. On the other hand, how could he turn down such a huge opportunity? According to the mythology, he invented the entire concept of The Simpsons in a matter of minutes. Brooks liked the idea, so Groening created dozens of animated shorts starring the members of the Simpson family. These were sprinkled through three seasons of The Tracey Ullman Show, with each 5. Those brief appearances might have marked the beginning and the end of The Simpsons, except that the production team began to notice something strange. Ullman often relied on extraordinary makeup and prosthetics to create her characters. This was problematic, because her performances were filmed in front of a live audience. To keep the audience entertained while Ullman prepared, someone suggested patching together and playing out some of the animations featuring the Simpsons. These animations had already been broadcast, so it was merely an opportunistic recycling of old material. Groening and Brooks began to wonder if the antics of Homer, Marge, and their offspring could possibly sustain a full-length animation, and soon they teamed up with writer Sam Simon to work on a Christmas special. Their hunch was right. In many ways, this episode set the tone for what was to follow over the next two decades, namely a relentless series of numerical references and nods to geometry that would earn The Simpsons a special place in the hearts of mathematicians. In hindsight, the mathematical undercurrent in The Simpsons was obvious from the start. The episode begins with a scene in which Maggie is building a tower out of her alphabet blocks. After placing a sixth block on top. The first question that faces him is a classic and, frankly, rather tedious mathematics problem. It concerns two trains leaving Sante Fe and Phoenix, each one traveling at different speeds and with different numbers of passengers, who seem to get on and off in odd and confusing groups. Bart is baffled and decides to cheat by The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets the answer sheet belonging to Martin Prince, the class dweeb. Pryor, the school psychologist. Thanks to his skulduggery, Bart has a score that indicates an IQ The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secretsand Dr. Pryor wonders if he has found a child prodigy. His suspicions are confirmed when he asks Bart if he finds lessons boring and frustrating. Bart gives the expected answer, but for all the wrong reasons. Pryor persuades Homer and Marge to enroll Bart at the Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children, which inevitably turns into a nightmarish experience. One student makes the. The teacher gives her students a problem, and it is at this point that we encounter the first example of an overt mathematical joke in The Simpsons. The teacher tries to help Bart amid the guffaws of his classmates by writing a couple of hints on the board. Eventually, she writes down the solution to the problem. Derivative dy equals three r squared dr over three, or r squared dr, or r dr r. However, even with this visual aid, I suspect that you may be as bewildered as Bart, in which case it might help to focus on the final line on the board. This line r dr r is not only the answer to the problem, but also the supposed punch line. This prompts two questions; why is r dr r funny and why is it the answer to the mathematics problem? The class laughs because r dr r sounds like har-de-har-har, an expression that has been used to indicate sarcastic laughter in reaction to a bad joke. Then, in the s, the phrase became even more popular when the Hanna-Barbera animation studio created a cartoon character named Hardy Har Har. This pessimistic hyena with a pork. Nevertheless, she still obtains the correct answer. The important equations are the six lines below the circle. So, the punch line involves a pun based on r dr r, but why is this the answer to the mathematics question? The teacher has posed a problem that relates to a notoriously nasty area of mathematics known as calculus. This is a topic that strikes terror into the hearts of many teenagers and triggers nightmarish flashbacks in some older people. Readers with no knowledge of calculus can be reassured that their blind The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets will not hinder their understanding of the rest of the chapter. Instead, the more pressing issue is why were the writers of The Simpsons putting complicated mathematics in their sitcom? They were keen to create scripts that included references to sophisticated concepts from all areas of human knowledge, and calculus was particularly high on the agenda because two of the writers were devotees of mathematics. These two nerds were responsible for the r dr r joke in particular and deserve credit more generally for making The Simpsons a vehicle for mathematical tomfoolery. Just like Maggie, he displayed his mathematical talents while playing with building blocks as a toddler. He The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets recalls a moment when he observed that the blocks obeyed a binary law, inasmuch as The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets of the smallest blocks were the same size as one medium block, while two of the medium blocks were the same size as one large block, and two of the large blocks equaled one The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets large block. At the age of eight, he wrote to Gardner explaining that he was a fan and pointing out a neat observation concerning palindromic square numbers, namely that they tend to have an odd number of digits. Palindromic square numbers are simply square numbers that are The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets same when written back to front, such as or 5, The eight-year-old was absolutely correct, because there are thirty-five such numbers less than billion, and only one of them—, —has an even number of digits. Reiss reluctantly admitted to me that his letter to Gardner also contained a question. He asked if there was a The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets or infinite supply of prime numbers. The question is based on the fact that each whole number has divisors, which are those numbers that will divide into it without any remainder. A prime number is notable because it has no divisors other than 1 and the number itself so-called trivial divisors. Thus, 13 is a prime number because it has no non-trivial divisors, but 14 is not, because it can be divided by 2 and 7. All numbers are either prime e. Between 0 and there are 25 prime numbers, but between and there are only 21 primes, and between and there are only 16 primes, so they certainly seem to The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets rarer. However, do we eventually run out of primes, or is the list of primes endless? Gardner was happy to point Reiss toward a proof by the ancient Greek scholar Euclid. Perversely, he achieved this result by assuming the exact opposite and employing a technique known as proof by contradiction or reductio ad absurdum. The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, the claim to have a complete list is clearly false. These divisors must be new primes, because the primes on the original list will leave a remainder of 1 when divided into N. Therefore, again, the claim to have a complete list is clearly false. Moreover, any attempt to repair the claim by adding some new prime numbers to the list is doomed to failure, because the entire argument can be repeated to show that the enhanced list of primes is still incomplete. This argument proves that any list of prime numbers is incomplete, which implies that there must be an infinity of primes. As the years passed, Reiss developed into a very accomplished young mathematician and earned a place on the state of Connecticut mathematics team. At the same time, he was developing a flair for comedy writing and was even receiving some recognition for his talent. I found out later all the Tonight Show writers would be entering the contest and here I was, aged ten, and I would win it, too. [PDF] [EPUB] The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets Download

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets to Book Page. You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons and its sister show Futurama without ever realizing that cleverly embedded in many plots are subtle references to mathematics, ranging from well-known equations to cutting-edge theorems and conjectures. That they exist, Simon Singh reveals, underscores the brilliance of the shows' writers, many of whom have advanc You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons and its sister show Futurama without ever realizing that cleverly embedded in many plots are subtle references to mathematics, ranging from well-known equations to cutting-edge theorems and conjectures. That they exist, Simon Singh reveals, underscores the brilliance of the shows' writers, many of whom have advanced degrees in mathematics in addition to their unparalleled sense of humor. NP; from perfect numbers to narcissistic numbers, infinity to even The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets infinities, and much more. Cohen, Al Jean, Jeff Westbrook, and Mike Reiss-whose love of arcane mathematics becomes clear as they reveal the stories behind the episodes. With wit and clarity, displaying a true fan's zeal, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets replete with images from the shows, photographs of the writers, and diagrams and proofs, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets offers an entirely new insight into the most successful show in television history. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. More Details Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. What if you haven't watched "The Simpsons" would the bookstill make sense? Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Oct 16, Andrij Zip rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fictionsciencemath. For everyone who has watched it, The Simpsons means a lot of things: long running animated show, brilliant social satire, pop culture phenomenon, an amazing cast of characters, irreverent humour. But steady source of ingenious math references? Simon Singh, a great popularizer of math and science, aims to turn that misconception on its head for readers of his excellent book, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets. Th For everyone who has watched it, The Simpsons means a lot of things: long running animated show, brilliant social satire, pop culture phenomenon, an amazing The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets of characters, irreverent humour. The book gives some background on the writers of the show, revealing that many of them hold PHDs in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ivy League universities. Apr 01, Francis Kayiwa rated it it was amazing. While my obsession with the Simpson's has waned over the years this book is a reminder of what made me unwittingly fall in love with this show. It you are interested in Mathemati While my obsession with the Simpson's has waned over the years this book is The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets reminder of what made me unwittingly fall in love with this show. It you are interested in Mathematics it is actually a pretty good refresher of what you miss by not doing maths on a daily basis. I mean c'mon do you really think about perfect numbers, narcissistic numbers or Mersenne Primes? Did you ever? Yeah, thought so. When you couple that with what appear to be random numbers to guess the attendance at an Isotopes Baseball game you really have to read this book. In addition dissecting the show Singh provides the readers with short biographical information of the writers. Many nay ALL of them had brilliant careers in Mathematics and decided to move to writing comedy. The world I would argue is better off for it. In a strange way reading this book gave me an appreciation on the fascination with dealing with absurdity. It made me understand how oft acerbic social commentary that comes from the show. May 01, Jheurf rated it did not like it. What a boring, boring audiobook. Pages and pages The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets detailed math history that goes from minutia to brain-dead simple. Then a quick paragraph to conclude and remin What a boring, boring audiobook. Then a quick paragraph to conclude and remind us that we are indeed reading a book supposedly about the Simpsons. This could have been an interesting article, without all the history. But I was expecting a little more entertainment from this book. Especially judging by its cover. View all 5 comments. Nov 04, Paul rated it it was ok Shelves: books-read Who'd have thought that a family based cartoon series would have so many maths links, but it turns out the Simpsons does. A significant number of the script writers on the Simpsons have some form of maths or science background, and arrived at the studios having either dropped out or after post doc studies. In this book Singh introduces us to them, and some of their backgrounds, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets well as outlining many of the ways that they have sneaked maths puzzles and jokes into the scripts and illustrations. It is not an in-depth maths book, which is what you would expect, as it is being pitched at Simpsons fans. Overall it was Ok I suppose. I do have one tiny confession though, I have never watched an episode of the Simpsons, so a fair amount of it washed straight over me. Worth 2. View all 4 comments. Apr 13, Edward rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviewedstarsmathematics-general. The Simpsons is an animated sitcom about a fictional "middle American" family. The series has been running since and is currently airing their 27th season. I haven't watched this show for many years now, but there was a time when I used to be obsessed with the show. I used to trawl over the internet in my quest to search for hidden and obscure references that appeared on the show, and for their meanings. One of the earliest references was from the first episode when baby Maggie stacks her a The Simpsons is an animated sitcom about a fictional "middle American" family. It's these references that make the show, whether they're mathematical, philosophical, political, historical or otherwise. It's not that the writers aim to poke fun of these subject matters but to make them fun. Simon Singh does a wonderful job in explaining the mathematics in an accessible way. But by The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets means is it a book for everyone. If you're the type of person who sweats at the thought of numbers or The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets then please do not read this book. This book is not so much as about the Simpsons as it is about the writers, in particular David S. Cohen and his colleagues, and their favourite areas of mathematics. To name but a few this book covers Pi, Fermat's last theorem, the Rubiks cube, Six degrees of separation of Kevin Bacon, Moneyball, women in mathematics and Sophie Germain, special numbers: such as Mersenne primes, Perfect numbers, Narcissistic numbers, Vampire numbers, sublime numbersrock paper scissors and non-transition dice, and much much more. There are special chapters called "Examination Papers" that appear after every chapters and they consist of random The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets humour, most of which are cringe worthy. The last four The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets delve into the mathematics of Futurama. In these chapters, my favourite mathematical reference comes from the number in homage to Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician. He once made a The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets over a taxicab number being the smallest number that is the sum of two cubes in three different ways. For those who know the show, is the serial number for Bender, the registry number for the spaceship Nimbus, and keeps cropping up in episodes of Futurama. For personal reason more than anything else, I would rate this book a 5. It's certainly one of the funniest mathematics books I have ever read. View all 6 comments. Oct 02, Ash rated it really liked it. One of my favorite jokes of The Simpsons happens to be a Math joke. This is odd because I absolutely detest Mathematics. I believe it was The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets on this Earth just to mock me but I digress. The joke, which is discussed in this book, is when Lisa discovers that nerds actually release a pheromone via their sweat glands that negatively attract bullies. This is a breakthrough and Lisa writes a paper about her findings. She is then invited to a big Science conference to present it. Everyone in the confe One of my favorite jokes of The Simpsons happens to be a Math joke. Everyone in the conference is speaking amongst themselves and Dr. The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets - Wikipedia

The SimpsonsSimon Singh says, is "arguably the most successful television show in history". It may also be the most allusive: it sometimes seems as if The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets aspect of the show is a knowing reference to something else. And sometimes it seems as if everything else is an unknowing reference to The Simpsons. Given the depth, or at least the breadth, of allusion in the show, and its long-running appeal it has been on air sinceit's little wonder that there have been so many books along the lines of The Simpsons and PhilosophyThe Psychology of the Simpsons etc. But "the truth", according to Singh, "is that many of the writers of The Simpsons are deeply in love with numbers, and their ultimate desire is to drip-feed The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets of mathematics into the subconscious minds of viewers". Whether or not the writers of The Simpsons are The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets using a cartoon to foist mathematical concepts on the unwary, Singh without question is. The latter are expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. It was also the number of a taxi taken by the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy when he went to visit his younger The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets Srinivasa Ramanujan in a Putney nursing home just after the end of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets first world war. Singh's book is full of such anecdotes. Some of the slightly tougher maths meanwhile is relegated to appendices, such as the one on "fractals and fractional dimensions". Fractals are "patterns that consist of self-similar patterns at every scale. In other words, the overall pattern associated with an object persists as we zoom in and out". Alongside the potted biographies of great mathematicians are potted biographies of the more mathematically minded Simpsons scriptwriters. They all follow more or less the same pattern: captain of the high-school maths team, an undergraduate degree in maths or physics from Harvard and a postgraduate degree in maths or computer science from Harvard, Berkeley or Princeton before being lured away by Hollywood. There are occasional, not always happy forays into other disciplines, such as sociology. In Lawrence Summersthe president of Harvard, made some ill- advised remarks about the reasons there were fewer women than men in university science and engineering departments, suggesting that "issues of intrinsic aptitude" were merely "reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialisation and continuing discrimination". Principal Skinner makes some unguarded observations about girls being less good than boys at maths; there's an outcry; a female maths teacher comes in to teach the girls "how do numbers make you feel? Bart says: "The only reason Lisa won is because she learned to think like a boy; The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets turned her into a burping, farting, bullying math machine. The writers told Singh "they did not want to deliver a simplistic or glib conclusion", or find themselves in "Skinner-like trouble". But the story is pretty cringeworthy all the same. Singh says only that "the writers sneakily sidestepped having to confront this controversial issue"; but he then goes on to quote Carl Friedrich Gausswriting to Sophie Germain in after discovering that she was not, in fact, Monsieur LeBlanc. Gauss observed that a woman, "according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarise herself with these thorny researches". There are five "examinations" at intervals through the book. Each consists of a series of mathematical jokes; if you get the joke, you score the points. I passed the "elementary", "high school" and "university senior" tests with flying The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, scraped through the "masters degree" and abjectly failed the "PhD" — though the titles of the tests must be meant to flatter the reader, since I gave up maths halfway through the sixth form. Some of the jokes are left unexplained, however. In "Gone Maggie Gone" Homer has to transport his baby Maggiehis dog and a bottle of poison pills across a river in a boat that's only strong enough to take one of them along with Homer at a time. The problem is that he can't leave the dog alone with the baby in case it bites her, or Maggie alone The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets the poison pills unless she eats one. It's a variation on a familiar puzzle, dating back at least to the 8th century, when Alcuin of York wrote it down. The first thing he has to do is take Maggie across. But as he's going back for either the dog or the pills, the baby is kidnapped by nuns. Singh doesn't explain the joke because it doesn't need explaining. But also because it undermines the conjecture his book is based on. Life, as Singh knows, isn't reducible to mathematics; and nor is The Simpsons. Science and nature books. Mmm … pi: the cult TV series is deeply in love with numbers. Thomas Jones.