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
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.
Frink: It should be obvious to even the most dimwitted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology that Homer Simpson has stumbled into the third dimension. . . . (drawing on a blackboard) Here is an ordinary square.
Wiggum: Whoa, whoa–slow down, egghead!
I just ran the numbers:
1782^12 = 1025397835622633634807550462948226174976
1841^12 = 1515812422991955541481119495194202351681
1922^12 = 2541210259314801410819278649643651567616
1782^12 + 1841^12 = 2541210258614589176288669958142428526657 1922^12
Explanation here
http://tinyurl.com/nuxds
[editor: pls learn to use tinyurl. I did it for you — once.]
[editor: pls learn to use tinyurl. I did it for you — once.]
I would suggest adding tinyerl.com [and a couple of equivalents?] to the “Comment Guidelines…” link – so you can refer posters to it.
Otto,
The article you link is the same one linked in Uncle Dav’e post – just at a different web-site… i.e. both links are to:
Mathematical references abound on The Simpsons
Erica Klarreich
if this numbers are correct, it doesn’t add up, so what’s the big deal?
This was one of my all-time favorite Simpsons episodes. I saw that picture a few months ago, but thought the numbers were about years. So, I looked up the following on Wikipedia:
January 7, 1782 – The first American commercial bank opens (Bank of North America).
August 16, 1841 – U.S. President John Tyler vetoes a bill which called for the re-establishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members riot outside the White House in the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history.
So, what happened in 1922? Herbert Hoover was Secretary of the Treasury, and eventually became the “Depression President” in 1929.
I’m not sure if these events were in the animators’ minds, or if the topic was actually Fermat.
Mathematicians, conspiracy theorists, debunkers — have at it! 🙂
Yep, Homer is dumb. But, as Homer would say it, “Dumb like a fox!”
Since when is “alt.tv.simpsons” a “site”?
You don’t have to ‘run the numbers”; the left side is an odd number and the right side an even number. Can’t be true!
1. So this is what a higher math BS session is like.
2. I’ve been to tiny.url; it’s the place Dell sent me to find the file (batch files?) to root out a McAfee bundled installation that would not uninstall and will probably be the biggest reason I go to hell (language!).
I remember reading about this in an article interviewing one of the Simpsons’ writers (I think it was on SimpsonsMath.com)- the guys behind the Simpsons and Futurama have a thing for sneaking in obscure math junk into the backgrounds of the shows…
But the guy basically wanted an equation that would only really appear to disprove Fermat’s last theorum on bad calculators. If you plug
1782^12 + 1841^12 into a calculator you get 2.5412102586… and 1922^12 2.5412102593 …so they match up for eight decimal places before the inequality becomes apparent.