The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
By Simon Singh
Hardcover, $26.00/Paperback $15.62/Kindle $9.99
Bloomsbury Publishing
October 2013
272 pages
The Simpsons recently began its 25th season, and you might wonder if there could ever be anything new under the Springfield sun after 530-some episodes. Remarkably, there is! Simon Singh has mined the show's scripts to unearth a seemingly infinite supply of mathematics and physics-related jokes that have been woven through the series by Ivy League-educated nerd writers.
Wait! Before you mathemaphobes abandon this review, I urge you to stay with me. A lot of this book is quite interesting and entertaining. Yes, it does venture into the thin air of theorems and intricate proofs that leave all but the most dedicated math heads feeling dizzy and disoriented. But even if you never were the same after Algebra II or Trig many years ago, this is still a fun read.
Here's a good one, according to Singh, a British writer whose purpose has been to make math and science accessible to the rest of us. In "Bye Bye Nerdie" from the 12th season, Professor John Frink, the secular saint of nerds, is attempting to call a boisterous meeting of scientists to order. Unsuccessful, Frink finally blurts out, "Scientists, please!. . .Some order please, with the eyes forward. . .and the hands neatly folded. . .and the paying of attention. . .Pi is exactly three!" Frink's faux pas brings the room to riveted silence, because, of course, everyone knows that the true value of pi is 3.1415926. . .
OK, perhaps it's not as funny retold in print. But then Singh links Frink's statement to an outrageously anti-science attempt to legislate an official value for pi in Indiana more than 100 years ago. The Indiana Pi Bill was inspired by a citizen, Edwin J. Goodwin, who thought he had "squared the circle" (Pi is the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle.) Unfortunately, his proposal had already been proved impossible 15 years earlier. Nevertheless, the bill was on its way to ratification until a mathematician from Purdue learned of the lunacy and called on the legislature to come back to Planet Earth.
Professor Frink's absurd declaration that pi equals 3 is a neat reminder that Goodwin's postponed bill still exists in a filing cabinet in the basement of the Indiana statehouse, waiting for gullible politicians to resuscitate it.
Frink's nerdy call to order is also a hilarious (and troubling) reminder that anti-science lunacy continues to crop up in legislatures trying to write creationism into school textbooks and outlaw vaccinations due to superstitious beliefs that they cause autism.
One of the surprising facts about The Simpsons is that many of the show's writers have mathematics and/or science-related degrees. For example, David S. Cohen, who wrote the Emmy-nominated "Homer³" part of "Treehouse of Horror VI" episode (1995), holds an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard and a master's degree in computer science from UC Berkeley. Singh says the Homer³ segment represents "the most intense and elegant integration of mathematics into The Simpsons." Cohen went on to co-create Futurama with The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, another Fox animated series that reflected the math and sci-fi imagination of Cohen.
Another Harvard-educated writer for the show, Jon Vitti, penned "Bart the Genius," the second episode of the first season. "Bart the Genius" is chock-full of both obvious and obscure references to equations and scientific puzzles -- an indication of the mathematical "undercurrent" that would characterize the show for the next two-plus decades, says Singh. If you recall, "Bart the Genius" unfolds as Bart, the perennial underachiever, ends up in a school for advanced children after he steals answers from Martin Prince, top brainiac of Springfield Elementary. In his first day at the school, the teacher writes on the board this equation, "y = r³/3," evoking chuckles from the class. Bart, of course, does not get it. The teacher spells out the punch line to him: "Derivative dy equals three r squared dr over three, or r squared dr, or r dr r." Or, har-de-har-har.
If you find yourself identifying with Bart here, you're not alone. Singh insists that insertion of math humor in the Simpsons is not one upmanship on the part of these amazingly bright and creative writers:
The truth is that many of the writers of The Simpsons are deeply in love with numbers, and their ultimate desire is to drip-feed morsels of mathematics into the subconscious minds of viewers.
One of the problems with passing along one's love of theorems and puzzles is that for the most part only half of the population historically seems to have gotten the joke. Singh notes that The Simpsons, not shy about plunging into areas of controversy, took on the issue of gender inequality in mathematics with the episode "Future Drama" (2005). Here Professor Frink has created a machine that allows a look into the future. Lisa discovers she will graduate early and go to Yale. The machine also projects that future women will dominate science and math to the point that the subjects are renamed Galgebra and Femistry. Singh reveals that the episode was inspired by comments made by Larry Summers, then president at Harvard, who speculated that women's aptitude for the sciences is limited compared with men. Summer's gaffe, which helped usher him out of Harvard and to a place front and center to the US financial crisis of 2008, also inspired another episode on the math-science gender gap, "Girls Just Want to Have Sums" (2006). In this episode, Lisa has to pose as Jake Boyman, in order to enter an all-boy math class. Singh says the story harks back to Sophie Germain, a French woman in the 18th century who disguised herself Yentl style to invade the all-male domain of mathematics. Germain is known, among other things, for ground-breaking work on Fermet's Last Theorem. (If you want to know more about Fermat's Theorem, buy the book -- it wouldn't be pretty if I try to explain it here.) The bottom line here is simple: If you love all things mathematical, then you will desire to make the field of study fully available to everyone -- women as well as men.
One of the things I have most appreciated about The Simpsons over the years is its savagely funny treatment of elitism -- whether it is knocking Kennedyesque Mayor Quimby or the Rich Texan of the Springfield GOP (headquartered of course in a dark tower). In the episode "They Saved Lisa's Brain" (1999), Singh recalls that Lisa is invited to join a local chapter of Mensa. When Mayor Quimby steps down from office due to corruption, the Mensa chapter takes over Springfield. Then they make elitist decisions that alienate the community -- introducing a metric time system, broccoli juice program and limiting sex to procreation (like the Vulcans of Star Trek, who go into heat every seven years). Springfield fights back by focusing its wrath on Lisa, who is rescued by none other than Stephen Hawking. Hawking, a fan of the series, is known for his work in cosmology, but Singh points out that he spent 30 years teaching mathematics at Cambridge.
Any book that deals with humor is open to the question, "What's so funny?" Singh provides a long list of mathematics jokes, unrelated to The Simpsons, to give a glimpse into what makes math PhDs, computer scientists and theoretical physicists roll on the floor with laughter. Here's a sample:
- Q: What did the number 0 say to the number 8? A: Nice belt!
- Q: What are the 10 kinds of people in the world? A: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
- Q: What do you call a mathematician who has lots of romantic liaisons, but who doesn't like to talk about it? A: A discrete data.
I think you get the idea. Humor is much more than the puns and rib ticklers of a particular subset of society. So how did math nerd humor become part of the best TV comedy writing of all time? Singh talked to the show's writers and found that the mathematically minded created jokes differently than the non-math writers. For example, J. Stewart Burns, who was working on a PhD in mathematics at UC Berkeley before he left to write for TV, said mathematicians tend to bounce around raw ideas for jokes while non-math folks tended to start with fully formed jokes. Jeff Westbrook, another writer who studied computer science theory before coming to The Simpsons, said writing comedy as a team is similar to sitting around a table with other theoreticians trying to solve a problem: "In one case, it's a mathematical theorem that's a problem. In the other case, it's a story issue." Singh argues that "writing as a big puzzle" comes easier to the mathematically trained because they are "more confident and comfortable exploring the unknown only with their intuition." To me this is somewhat of a stretch, but I get his point. To solve a complex equation, or to develop a funny story, requires a certain level of comfort with the unknown.
The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets is Singh's latest apologia for the mathematically minded, and even if you have an aversion to math, it is worth a look. I guarantee that after reading it, you will not watch The Simpsons in the same way. You will find yourself more amused, even if you don't fully understand every joke.