I’m a math geek, have been all my life. So I was delighted when I saw this one. Had no idea the Simpsons’ writing staff were so mathematically inclined. Here are a few examples.

The episode climaxes with Tabitha appearing on the Jumbo Vision screen at the Springfield stadium, where she publicly proclaims her love for Buck. More important, just before she appears on the screen, it displays a question that asks the baseball fans in the crowd to guess the attendance.

The screen displays three multiple choice options; 8,128, 8,208 and 8,191. These digits might seem arbitrary and innocuous, but in fact they represent a perfect number, a narcissistic number and a Mersenne prime.

The article goes on to give the details on each class of numbers. What amazes me is how much work they put in to create a short chunk of animation that few, if any, in the audience will notice. That’s craft. Or insanity.

Here’s another example (and my personal favorite). Note that the carat (^) symbol stands for “raised to the power of”, as in 2^5 = 32:

Professor Andrew Wiles (now Sir Andrew Wiles) worked in secrecy for seven years to fulfil a childhood dream and build a proof that confirmed that Fermat was right, inasmuch as the following equation has no solution: x^n + y^n = z^n, for n > 2. It is neither necessary to understand the proof nor to examine the equation in detail, except I should stress again that both Wiles and Fermat claimed, indeed proved, that this equation has no solutions, yet Homer’s blackboard proves the opposite!

3987^12 + 4365^12 = 4472^12.

Check it for yourself on your phone calculator and you will find that the equation balances!

I’ll leave it to you to figure out the fly in the ointment. Or just read the article.