The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets Paperback – October 14, 2014

I've been watching The Simpson's since I was a child, I believe around season 3 up until I got into college and simply had no time for them anymore. Stumbling around and watching youtube videos I recently came across a channel called Numberphile. This is man that introduced to me about his book, Simon Singh (what an interesting hairstyle I'll add to that).Simon Singh got on, and within seconds into the video he blew my mind that The Simpson's writers were sneaking in bits of math in nearly every episode, this whole time, underneath my radar! And to think, the most obvious of them all was when Bart Simpson cheated off of Martin (well swapped exams) was littered with math gags from the start to finish and I just blew it off because it was a theme of that episode, ahh just a gifted school with lots of math- I didn't think much of it. All I'm going to say is "RD=RR." You'll definitely get it once you put in a little research which all sources came from this book.I loved it how Homer Simpson defies two of the greatest mathematicians in history. Where he scribbles a solutions to Fermat's last theorem where the exponent, n, has a solution where n>2. Take a moment, this is Homer Simpson who is defying these people.I loved the reference of Apu and how he was able to recite pie to the 40,000th decimal place and the behind of the scenes of what it took to get a hold of that number.This book is wonderful, it's amazing, but certainly it's a surprising yellow book. Math and comedy? Who would have guessed?I had a wonderful discussion/time with my math professor about this, and she was laughing and was also in shocked, she too is a fan of The Simpsons and like many of us, she had no idea this was going on.This is definitely a book I love, and there are a few things in my life that I have purchased and was satisfied.*off topic* an example, I bought a coffee machine thinking that I'll stop spending money at retail coffee shops, did it happen? Nope, I ended up spending more and having in-taking more coffee! go figure.

This is a very professional, well written, pleasant book. It recalls brief elements of various Simpsons and Futurama episodes and intersperses these with longer, chatty accounts of various mathematical matters. The Simpsons are brilliant, Singh is a very successful author, and who doesn’t like mathematics? So the idea of this book must have seemed like a sure winner. But it doesn’t work perfectly. The problems with the book are all minor, but together they produce a somewhat unsatisfactory overall result. There are some interesting behind-the-scenes information about the making of the Simpsons, but not as much as one would have hoped. A lot of mathematical material is stock standard, of the kind one would find in many books, so there isn’t much in it that is original or interesting. And none of the mathematical ideas are explored in any depth at all. There are a lot of standard math jokes in the book, but they are mostly old and tired. And sadly it’s not great from an educational point of view. The level of math, which is always superficial, is rather uneven. At times the reader is told not to “feel guilty” if they skip over some trivial arithmetic that is included in the book. But then later the reader is required to digest factorials and exponentials. As for the content, there are occasionally interesting things, like the pancake sorting problem, but they appear in a sea of utter trivia, like the definition of “googolplex” or the idiotic notion of the Erdos-Bacon number. Occasionally, some parts irritated me. For example, the treatment of the on-base plus slugging percentage is disappointing; the book doesn’t discuss this metric at all, leaving the impression that it is a natural statistical measure. Also, while the Simpsons writers are undoubtedly wonderfully gifted individuals, Singh consistently exaggerates their mathematical bona fides; it seems that according to Singh, a “mathematician” is anyone who has dropped out of a math course. Anyway, despite the above litany of complaints, I did actually enjoy the book. Certainly not Singh’s best book, but definitely still worth reading.

I am a die-hard Simpsons fan, and while I'm no mathemagician, I do find numbers interesting. This book presents some really interesting mathematical concepts inspired by or visible on the show. It is written in a very easy to read format, and you do not need to be a math wizard to enjoy the book. However, while most of the math is explained in a simplified manner, I feel like those who do understand the mathematics will have a better appreciation for the text.In addition to the mathematics, you also learn some cool trivia about the show and some of its uber-nerd writers. (I do wish Swartwelder was a math genius, because he's awesome- but sadly, he doesn't get much mention in this book)There were a few mentions of episodes from newer seasons, but I was pleased to see that the majority of the book focused on earlier episodes. In fact, the first chapter takes a detailed look at the "har-dee-har-har" calculus problem from Season One's "Bart The Genius."One thing to note- the last few chapters deal exclusively with Groening's other show, Futurama. This isn't a bad thing- it's a logical extension of the book, and Futurama has even more nerdiness in it than the Simpsons- it was just unexpected. I feel like you could easily devote a whole book to Futurama, not just a few chapters.For anyone with even a remote appreciation of numbers and a love for the Simpsons, this book would be a great purchase. Even if you aren't into the whole math thing, you will read some great stories about the history of the show.