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Sunday, June 11, 2006

Math on The Simpsons

Here's a page highlighting a lot of the math in The Simpsons and all the work that goes into it.
Evidently
David X. Cohen one of The Simpsons creators has a masters in Comp. Sci. and wrote a program to figure out a set of numbers that disproved Fermat's last theorem (or at least seemed to).
In the 1995 Halloween episode of the award-winning animated sitcom The Simpsons, two-dimensional Homer Simpson accidentally jumps into the third dimension. During his journey in this strange world, geometric solids and mathematical formulas float through the air, including an innocent-looking equation: 178212 + 184112 = 192212. Most viewers surely ignored this bit of mathematical gobbledygook.

Fox Broadcasting Company

On the fan discussion site alt.tv.simpsons, however, the equation caused a bit of a stir. "What's going on, he seems to have disproved Fermat's last theorem!" one fan marveled, referring to the famous claim by Pierre de Fermat—proved just months earlier—that for any exponent n bigger than 2, there are no nonzero whole numbers a, b, and c for which an + bn = cn. The Simpsons equation, if correct, would be a counterexample to the theorem, meaning that the proof had been wrong.

posted by Steve at 6/11/2006 12:17:00 PM  

2 Comments:

Katherine said...

the formatting got messed up in your copy. It's supposed to be 1782^12 + 1841^12 = 1922^12.

OK, actually, I just looked at the original article and its formatting is wrong. Well yeah, what I said is right as you can see in the picture -- those numbers are supposed to be raised to the 12th power.

Sun Jun 11, 04:48:37 PM CDT

 
Steve said...

haha...dork ;)

Sun Jun 11, 05:18:22 PM CDT

 

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