NEW math on Futurama

The Aug 19, 2010 episode of Futurama had NEW math in it! It also has some other math refs.

1. This website claims that Ken Keeler, one of the writers who has a PhD in math, devised a NEW theorem for use in the show. The theorem and proof are here. I do not know if it is new but it is correct and interesting.
2. Bender the robot had mind switched with Amy, so he was in a human body. In order to prove that he was really a robot he had to pass the reverse Turing Test.
3. Since PURE MATH lead to a solution of a PRACTICAL PROBLEM The professor exclaimed And they say pure math has no real applications!

This is the first time I know of where some new correct math was introduced on a fictional TV show. NUMB3RS often had new bogus math.

Both The Simpsons and Futurama have websites devoted to math refs in the show: Simpsons Math, Futurama Math.

It is not surprising that The Simpsons and Futurama have math refs since writers Jeff Westbrook, David X. Cohen, and Ken Keeler who write for these shows, are all math folk.

See these two prior posts for more on comedy and math.

Math on the Simpsons Last Night

Last night on The Simpsons they had a math problem. Homer solved it! Since Jeff Westbrook (PhD from Tarjan) is one of the writers, and I've heard they have other writers with a math bend, I'm not too surprised that they had a math problem. I am surprised that Homer solved it. Its a problem you've probably heard in other forms:

Homer has with him Baby Maggie, his dog, and a jar of poisons that look like delicious candy. (Homer: Oh, why did I take my baby and my dog with me when I went to buy poison! And why do the poison has to look so delicious!?) He needs to get all three across the river. He can only take one of them at a time in his rowboat. He can't leave Maggie with the poison. He can't leave the dog with the poison. (He CAN leave Maggie and the dog.) How does he do this?

The Simpsons has had lots of math on it. There is a webpage of all math on The Simpsons here, though it doesn't have last night's episode yet (quite reasonable--- if you expect that then you expect to much from the digital age).

How does The Simpsons compares to Numb3rs in terms of the accuracy of the math presented? I suspect The Simpsons is more accurate; but, to be fair, they don't have to find some goofy math way to solve a crime every week. The math on Numb3rs, goofy as it sometimes is, does connect to some math of interest, see this web page.

Can Jerry Seinfeld crack P vs NP ?

The following is a quote from Comedian Jerry Seinfeld. The source is Seinfeld Universe: The Entire Domain by Greg Gattuso (Publisher of Nothing: The Newsletter for Seinfeld Fans, page 96.

I was great at Geometry. If I wanted to train someone as a comedian, I would make them do lots of proofs. That's what comedy is: a kind of bogus proof. You set up a fallacious premise and then prove it with rigorous logic. It just makes people laugh. You'll find that most of my stuff is based on that system ... You must think rationally on a completely absurd plane.

I doubt that many comedians have seen lots of proofs though they may have an intuitive sense of logic for their routines. And not all comedians use this style.

I know of one theoretical computer scientist who is a comedy writer. Jeff Westbrook got his PhD in 1989 with Robert Tarjan on Algorithms and Data Structures for Dynamic Graph Algorithms. He was faculty at Yale, and then a researcher at AT+T before working on the TV shows Futurama and The Simpsons. I actually met him in 1989- he didn't seem that funny at the time.

Are there other theorists or mathematicians that are also professional comedians or comedy writers? I doubt there are many. If you define theorist or mathematician as having a PhD then I assume its very very few. If you defining it as majored in math or CS there would probably be some.