Author(s): Simon Singh

Popular Science

Everyone knows that The Simpsons is probably the most successful show in television history. What you might not know is that it contains enough sophisticated mathematics to form a university course, and then some. In the first ever episode, baby Maggie is messing around with some building blocks, which she nonchalantly piles up into a stack that reads EMCSQU. She's cracked Einstein's famous formula, E=mc2. You might not notice unless you're a bit nerdy, but it's a sign of things to come. The following twenty-five series are peppered with subtle and not-so-subtle references to theorems, conjectures and equations: Bart being mistaken for a boy-genius and sent to an Enriched Learning Centre for Gifted Children where the students speak only in algebra; Lisa proving that statistical analysis can lead a school baseball team to victory; and the aged Professor Fink showing off his mind-bending Frinkahedron. And most unexpected of all, it's maths that actually works, even the stuff that's just scribbled on a classroom blackboard.