SIMON SINGH: Great.
Thank you very much for inviting me here to speak today.
So this is the book-- "The Simpsons
And Their Mathematical Secrets."
I've been working on this book-- I first
started writing to the writers about eight or nine years ago.
And for the last eight or nine years,
I've been thinking about this book
and talking about this book.
And whenever I talk about "The Simpsons"
and I say to people there's tons of maths hidden
in "The Simpsons," people are always shocked and surprised.
And what I'm trying to do in this book is,
I'm trying to explain to people that there
are lots of writers on "The Simpsons" who love.
There are lots of writers on "The Simpsons"
who studied mathematics to degree level,
to master's level, to PhD level.
Now they're no longer mathematicians,
they're now writers, but they still love mathematics.
And the way they express that love
is by putting little bits of mathematics
into the series-- often when we're not looking.
What sort of thing am I talking about?
Well, for example, here's an episode
called, "Marge + Homer Turn a Couple Play."
The story here is that Buck "Home Run" Mitchell
is married to Tabitha Vixx.
And Tabitha Vixx and Buck have a marital spat.
Their marriage is in trouble.
They go and talk to Homer and Marge
and Homer and Marge repair their marriage.
And by the end of the episode everything's all right.
But the very finale of the episode, Tabitha
proclaims her love to Buck.
But at the end of the episode, at the same time,
on the Jumbo-Vision screen at Springfield Stadium, what
you see is this question up on the Jumbo-Vision screen.
And it asks the crowd, what's the attendance at the game?
Is it 8191, is it 8128, is it 8208,
or is there no way to tell?
OK.
And nobody ever noticed this, because everybody's
paying attention to Tabitha.
Nobody ever noticed these numbers.
But each one of these numbers is there
for a very special reason.
It's there because each one of those numbers
is mathematically significant.
So for example, you take the first number, 8191.
8191 is a prime number.
Some of you may have spotted that.
But it's not just any old prime number,
it's a Mersenne prime number.
So Mersenne prime numbers have this very special form.
They're of the form 2 to the power of p minus 1,
where p is also a prime number.
So in this case, if you raise it to the power 13,
2 to the power of 13 minus 1, you get 8191.
So somebody put in that 8191, because, OK, it's
a plausible number for a baseball crowd.
But it's also a Mersenne number.
And Mersenne primes are very special.
I think the ten biggest prime numbers
we know are all Mersenne primes.
So somebody put some thought into that.
And the next number is the same.
The next number is 8128.
8128 is a very special number.
It's what's known as a perfect number,
and a perfect number is one of those numbers where
the divisors is of the number add up to the number itself.
So the simplest example is 6.
1, 2, and 3 divide into 6, and 1 plus 2 plus 3 equals 6.
Next perfect number is 28 because 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14
divide into 28 and they add up to 28.
You might think they're fairly common.
6 and 28, you know, we're already
getting a couple of perfect numbers.
But the third perfect number is 496.
And the fourth perfect number is 8128.
And they get fewer and further between.
I think Rene Descartes said that perfect numbers,
like perfect men, are very rare.
And they're rare, and they're special,
so they get to be on the scoreboard.
Third number, this is a number I hadn't really heard of,
a type of number I hadn't heard of before I
started writing this book.
8208, what's special about 8208 is, it's got four digits
and so what you do is you raise each digit to the fourth power.
Four digits, so you raise each digit to the fourth power.
8 to the power 4 plus 2 to the power 4
plus 0 to the power plus 8 to the power 4.
Sorry, let me say that again.
8 to the power 4 plus 2 to the power 4 plus 0 to the power 4
plus 8 to the power 4.
Add those together and you get back to 8208.
So the number regenerates itself from its own components.
It's kind of in love with itself and so
it's called a narcissistic number.
And again these numbers are very rare.
There's less than a hundred of them that we know of.
And the biggest one is that.
I think it's about 39 digits long.
And you might want to have a think this afternoon--
because I know the kind of people you are --why you cannot
have a narcissistic number with more than 39 digits, OK.
They're rare, they're special, there's less than 100 of them.
They get to have a special place up on the score board.
So this is the kind of thing I'm talking about,
really niche mathematical knowledge embedded
within an episode for no particular reason.
I had to mention this one.
The cinema, the movie theater in Springfield
is called the Springfield Googolplex Theatre.
And I guess this is part of your history here at Google.
So I'll tell it to you anyway.
The googol, of course.
Again, you have to remember, the first time
the googolplex appeared in the Simpsons
was back in the early 1990s, so before the company Google
existed.
So nowadays people may have an idea
about what a googol is mathematically,
what a googolplex is mathematically.
But when this first appeared on the Simpsons,
nobody had heard of a googol.
Nobody had heard of a googolplex.
And so it was a really in-joke for the mathematicians
who were watching.
The name googol was invented by a mathematician and his nephew.
The mathematician was Edward Kasner.
And he was going for a walk with his nephew.
And he said, okay-- a million's got 6 0's, a billion's got 9
0's, a trillion's got 12 0's.
What do we call a number with 100 0's?
And his nephew said why don't we call it a googol?
And that's where the name googol came from.
A googol is a number 1 followed by 100 0's.
And then the uncle said, OK, well a googol
sounds like a good number.
What about a googolplex?
What would a googolplex be?
And the nephew thought about that,
and he said, OK, that's easy.
A googolplex is 1 followed by so many 0's
that your arm gets tired.
Now that's not very mathematically reliable,
so the uncle said, OK, well a googol is 10 to the power 100.
A googolplex is 10 to the power of googol.
So again, this is a really mathematical in-joke
in "The Simpsons."
Now, who's putting these jokes in there?
Who's making these references?
Well, that particular reference was probably made by this chap
here.
In the back row, second from the left,
is a chap called Mike Reiss.
I say probably Mike because the writing
process on "The Simpsons" is very collaborative,
and we're going back 20 years now,
and so it's hard to remember who said what.
And people are very generous in terms of sharing credit.
But it was probably Mike Reiss in this case.
I met the "Simpsons" writers last year
and I chatted to all of them.
And I met Mike.
And Mike's interest in maths goes back a long, long way.
When he was in the high school math team, he was very good,
he was very strong.
He competed against other schools,
competed at state level.
He was a very bright, a very strong mathematician.
He was also a very keen writer and loved
comedy, loved comedy writing.
So even when he was younger than that, when he was,
I think, 11 or 12, he told me he went to the dentist one day,
and he was waiting in the waiting room,
and he was reading through "New York" magazine.
So, not "The New Yorker," but "New York" magazine, and he
was looking at the back page where
they have the cartoon caption competition.
And he was looking at the cartoon caption competition,
the dentist came back and said, oh, look, Mike.
I see you're looking at the cartoon caption competition.
I enter that competition every month.
I always manage to think of something every month.
And Mike said, yes, so do I. And I've won it three times.
And he was competing against TV comedy writers in New York
and winning this competition.
So he had this talent for comedy writing and mathematics.
Somebody else who was in the room-- in fact,
the chap who told me it was probably
Mike who came up with that joke, was Al Jean.
Al Jean, again this is another high school photo of him
in the mathematics team.
There he is in the back row in the middle.
Al Jean, another very bright young mathematician.
In fact he was so bright that he was taken out of-- well,
he was put into a special program
for elite mathematicians.
This was going back to, I guess, the mid '70s.
And the idea was America wanted to compete
with the Russian elite mathematical education system.
And so people like Al Jean were hot housed in special summer
courses.
And he was such a bright young mathematician,
that he went off to Harvard to study mathematics
when he was just 16 years old.
So these are really bright people.
Al and Mike met at Harvard, they left Harvard,
they went into comedy writing.
They joined "The Simpsons" They worked
on that very first episode of "The Simpsons"
and even in that very first episode you get mathematics,
you get mathematical references.
But the interesting thing is that, if you're
looking at "The Simpsons," and if you look at it now
and you spot a mathematical reference-- now, you know,
you'll be more eagle-eyed and more keen to find these things.
But if you find a mathematical reference
it could be that the writer of that episode
is not necessarily an ex-mathematician.
Let me explain how that happens.
This is an episode called "Marge in Chains."
Now, you may remember this one.
Marge is accused of theft from the Quik-E-Mart,
and she's put on trial, and the star witness is Apu.
And Lionel Hutz, the attorney, is trying to discredit Apu
and saying to him, you've got a terrible memory.
Why should we trust your evidence?
Why should we trust your witness testimony?
You've got a terrible memory.
And Apu responds by saying, no no, I've got a great memory.
In fact my memory is so good, in fact, I
can recite pi to 40,000 decimal places,
and the last digit is 1.
So he could have said anything.
He could've said I can remember the Springfield telephone
directory.
But he says pi.
And he talks about reciting the digits of pi.
Now, there are a couple of interesting things
behind the scenes of this one simple line
that I want to explain to you.
First of all, why 40,000 digits?
Why was Apu claiming 40,000 digits?
Well that was the world record in 1993 for memorizing pi.
So it was a genuine world record,
and Apu claimed to be able to match it.
Sure enough, the 40,000th digit is 1.
OK, can't get that wrong.
In fact, you can't get that wrong
if the writing team consults a world pi expert.
They contacted a guy called David Bailey at NASA
at the time.
And David Bailey was a world authority on pi.
And he'd developed something called the spigot algorithm.
When I was at school, I was always
told that if you want to calculate
the fifth digit of pi, you need to calculate
the first, second, third, and fourth digits.
If you want to calculate the hundredth digit of pi,
you've got to calculate single digit before it.
The great thing with the spigot algorithm
is that it's like a tap.
A spigot is a tap and it drips, and it
will drip whichever decimal place you want.
So if you want the millionth decimal place of pi,
you just adjust the tap, and the millionth decimal place
drips out.
And that's what David Bailey invented.
And he could've just dripped the 40,000 decimal
place, except the spigot algorithm only
works in hexadecimal, which is not
very friendly for a TV audience.
So instead of dripping the 40,00th digit in hexadecimal,
he sent them all 40,000 digits in a big package and they could
go figure out for themselves.
But the other thing I wanted to explain about this line
is that this is one of those episodes that
wasn't written by a mathematician.
It was actually written by a couple of people.
It was written by Josh Weinstein and Bill Oakley.
And neither of them are mathematicians.
So the question is, why are non-mathematicians putting math
into their episodes as well?
And the way this happened was-- I met Josh last year,
and he said that that wasn't his line.
He and Bill didn't come up with that line.
What had happened was that they were given that episode
to write, they went away for a couple of weeks,
and they wrote the broad structure
of the story, the key plot points.
They put in the key jokes.
And then they bring it back to the rest of the writing team.
And the rest of the writing team will maybe
identify the weaker jokes and take them out, maybe
help make some of the good jokes even better.
And it's at that stage that around the table
there will almost certainly be one or two mathematicians.
And that's the stage at which you can introduce mathematics
into a script that otherwise was devoid of mathematics.
So in this case the original script
said-- Josh dug this up from his garage,
the original script --Lionel Hutz
says to Apu, "So, Mr. Nahasapeemapetilon,
if that is your real name, have you ever forgotten anything?"
And Apu says, "No.
In India I was known as Mr. Memory.
I featured in over 400 films, including 'Here Comes Mr.
Memory.'"
So nothing to do with pi.
But you can imagine, around that table
the mathematicians would've said, yeah here's
an opportunity to get some maths in, some mathematics.
But it's also an opportunity to build up Apu's back story.
Because you may or may not be aware
that Apu is also a mathematician.
If you piece together different elements
from different episodes, you get his back story.
And Apu studied at Caltech.
He went to Caltech-- not the California
Institute of Technology, but the Calcutta
Institute of Technology.
And then after graduating, he came to America
and he studied for a PhD in computer science
from Professor Frink.
And he studied at the Springfield Heights Institute
for Technology, which has a rather unfortunate acronym,
as you've already spotted.
So you get the mathematics in here
because it fits in with Apu's background
and you can have a bit of fun with pi.
It's easy to think that the math in the Simpsons
is going to be linked to Lisa, it's
going to be linked to Professor Frink,
it's going to be linked to Apu, the kind of more
mathematically-minded characters.
But you find that Homer and all the other characters
often exhibit, or get involved with, mathematical references.
So, for example, this is an episode
called "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,"
where Homer tries to become an inventor.
Again, it's kind of a freeze frame gag,
you've got to really look carefully, because in one scene
there's a blackboard.
And on the blackboard you have-- that's
a reference to the mass of the universe.
It's a science equation.
That's an equation that relates to the mass of the Higgs boson,
mass h 0.
And if you work that out, you find
that that predicts a mass that, I think,
is about double the actual mass of the Higgs boson.
But that's not bad.
This was happening 15 years before the Higgs
was even discovered.
In terms of mathematics, you get a topology reference
down here about the reshaping of doughnuts into spheres.
But you have to nibble at them rather than twist them.
But the one that really caught my eye-- and this
is the episode, I think, that really
got me interested in all of this mathematics in "The Simpsons."
This equation here-- a number to the 12th power
plus another number to the 12th power
equals another number to the 12th power.
Now that caught my eye because the first book
that I wrote in the UK was called "Fermat's Last Theorem."
In the US, it was called "Fermat's Enigma."
And it's all about this chap here, Pierre de Fermat,
who was a French mathematician.
Very, very quickly I'll tell you the story.
He was studying an ancient Greek text one day,
the Arithmetica by Diophantus.
And Diophantus talked about the fact
that there are lots of solutions to the Pythagorean equation,
x squared plus y squared equals z squared.
3 squared plus 4 squared equals 5 squared.
5 squared plus 12 squared equals 13 squared.
There are lots of solutions to that equation.
There are an infinite number of solutions, in fact.
But Fermat wondered what happens if you increase
the power to something bigger than two.
So for example, x to the power of 3 plus y to the power of 3
equals z to the power of 3, or any power bigger than 2.
Can you find any solutions to any of those equations?
Now, Pierre de Fermat claimed that he
could prove, without a shadow of a doubt,
that there were no solutions.
He wrote in the margin of his book,
"I have a truly marvelous proof of this fact.
I have a demonstrationum mirabilum.
But this margin is too narrow to contain that proof.
Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet."
And then he dropped dead.
I Or a few years later he dropped dead.
People found the book, they said, well,
Fermat says he can prove these equations have no solutions.
But he doesn't tell us what that proof is.
And for 350 years, everybody tries to rediscover the proof.
Eventually a chap called Sir Andrew Wiles
rediscovers the proof.
And we now know for a fact that none of these equations
have any solutions.
So you will never find a 12 power plus a 12 power
equalling a 12 power.
And yet that's what Homer gives us here.
And if you check that, if you've got a phone,
you check it on your phone calculator, that works.
So Homer is defying Andrew Wiles,
he's defying Pierre de Fermat, because he
has found a solution that seems to work.
Now why does it seem to work?
Well if you calculate it more accurately,
it's what's called a near-miss solution,
because the actual solution is the following.
It's not 4472, but 4472.000000 dedede dah.
So it's called a near-miss solution.
It's a solution that will fool you.
It's a solution that will fool your calculators.
But if you've got a precise calculator, one
with a proper long display, you can find out
that it's a near-miss error.
So again this is a lovely example of one of the writers,
in this case, David X. Cohen, going
to the trouble of putting something in the back of shot,
a little gag, a little reference the lovers of mathematics
will spot, will be annoyed by, and then will have resolved.
So it's just a prank.
It's just a prank for those who love mathematics.
And there's tons-- I'll just see how we're doing for time here.
I mean there is tons more.
There's another reference of Fermat's Last Theorem
in "Tree House of Horror VI." "Treehouse of Horror VI"
also has references to Cartesian coordinates,
has references to p versus np, that great unsolved problem.
It has references to Euler's equation again,
has references to the Utah teapot.
It has stuff in ASCII.
There's so much in "The Simpsons"
that you could write a whole book about it, in fact.
So rather than go on about "The Simpsons" further,
I did want to talk about "Futurama," because "Futurama"
is the sister series of "The Simpsons"
and it has just as much mathematics as "The Simpsons."
The story here is that, in the mid '90s,
Fox could see that "The Simpsons" was a huge success
and they asked Matt Groening to come up with something else.
He came up with Futurama.
He worked with David X. Cohen to develop the idea.
And David is one of the guiding lights
of the series, worked on it ever since.
And he's a mathematician at heart.
I think he studied physics at Harvard
then did computer science, a master's
in computer science at Berkeley.
And has then written mathematical papers.
And he loves mathematics.
He's put mathematics into "The Simpsons"
and he's going to put mathematics
into "Futurama" as well.
And he was also keen to recruit mathematicians
to join the "Futurama" writing team.
It was quite important not to poach writers
from "The Simpsons," so new writers came on board.
People like Ken Keeler, who has a PhD in applied mathematics.
People like Jeff Westbrook, who was
a professor at Yale University.
So you had new mathematicians coming to join "Futurama,"
working with David X. Cohen to create a series which was also
going to have tons of mathematics in it.
This is a picture of Ken Keeler.
It's not the greatest picture of Ken Keeler.
But it's of great historical importance,
because this relates to an episode called
"The Prisoner of Benda," where Professor Farnsworth invents
a mind-switching machine.
And everybody starts switching minds left, right, and center.
And at the end of the episode everybody
gets bored and wants to get back to their original minds.
But the mind-switching machine, once two people have swapped,
they cannot swap back.
So the question is this-- given any number of people,
given any amount of mind switching,
is there a way to guarantee that everybody can get back
to their original minds?
And Ken Keeler developed a little theorem.
And he's very modest about it, he
doesn't think it's a great piece of mathematics.
But it's an interesting, fun piece of mathematics.
And this is him scribbling it up on the whiteboard
in the Futurama offices, which is
why it's of great historical significance.
But he was able to prove that, regardless
of the size of the switching, regardless
of the number of switching, if you introduce two fresh bodies
into the room, they provide you with enough wriggle room
for everybody else to get back to their bodies.
So, and I just wanted to mention this
because this is the only example in the history of television
of a writer creating a bespoke theorem in order
to complete a plot.
So that's the extent of the kind of stuff
that goes on in "Futurama."
I'll just give you one example from "Futurama,"
which is the number 1729.
1729 crops up in "Futurama."
It crops up as the hull registry number of the Nimbus spaceship.
It crops up also as Bender's unit number.
Bender the alcoholic robot.
It crops up in "The Farnsworth Parabox"
as one of the universities that's featured.
So 1729 keeps cropping up.
If it was just the hull registry number, OK, we can ignore it.
But the fact it keeps cropping up
means that it must have some mathematical significance,
given the fact we have Ken Keeler and David X Cohen
and Jeff Westbrook working on this team.
And one reason why 1729 is special
is that it's called a Harshad number.
And Harshad numbers have this odd property.
If you take the digits of 1729 and add them up,
they come to 19.
And 19 divides into 1729.
And that's all it has to be, to be a Harshad number.
What's particularly special about 1729 is,
if you reverse 19, you get the other factor of 1729.
Yeah.
That always gets an ooh, that does, that always gets an ooh.
So it's a very special type of Harshad number,
but in fact there are four numbers
that exhibit this property.
So it's special but not special enough
to justify being cited so many times in "Futurama."
And the real reason why 1729 keeps cropping up
is because of this gentleman here.
This is Srinivasa Ramanujan, arguably
the most talented or naturally gifted
mathematician of the 20th century.
He grew up in southern India, was from a very poor family--
I think his three siblings all died in infancy.
He suffered from smallpox but survived.
His family just about managed to give him a basic education.
He couldn't get to university, couldn't get to college,
but still he would study mathematics
by going to the library.
And he'd pick out books and study the mathematics
within them.
And pretty soon he wasn't just studying
the mathematics in these books, he
was creating new mathematics, new theorems.
And eventually he had a whole package
of these, about 120 theorems that he'd created.
And nobody could understand what he was doing.
And so he sent them to a professor, GH Hardy,
in Cambridge, England.
And they arrived on Hardy's desk.
And Hardy was blown away.
He couldn't believe what had appeared out of nowhere
from an unknown mathematician on the other side of the planet.
And his immediate reaction was to invite
Ramanujan to come to Cambridge.
And GH Hardy was a formidable mathematician.
He's credited with galvanizing English mathematics
at a time when English mathematics was in the doldrums
compared to France and Germany.
So he really was spearheading British mathematics.
And yet, he said, if there's only one great thing I've
done in my life, it was to bring Ramanujan over to England.
Because when he came to Cambridge, he flourished.
His genius was recognized.
He became a Fellow of the Royal Society-- one of the youngest
Fellows of the Royal Society.
He became the first Indian to become
a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
And his mathematical potential was being fulfilled.
Sadly, however, physically, he was really suffering.
The cold weather really hurt him.
He was a strict vegetarian, he was a strict Hindu,
so the diet didn't really suit him either.
He came down with tuberculosis, eventually.
And he went back to India and died
in his 30s, tragically young.
But just before we went back to India, when he was ill
he was in a nursing home in Putney in South London.
And Hardy went to visit him.
And Hardy took a train from Cambridge to London,
took a taxi from the station to the nursing home,
went into the hospital, sat next to Ramanujan.
And, struggling to make conversation,
perhaps, Ramanujan said, what was
the name of the taxi you came in?
And Hardy said it wasn't very interesting, it was just 1729.
And Ramanujan said, 1729?
No, that is a really interesting number.
It's an interesting number because 1729 is the smallest
number that's the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
Let me just unpack that.
1729 is 10 cubed plus 9 cubed.
Now most numbers aren't the sum of two cubes,
so that's interesting.
1729 is also the sum of 12 cubed plus 1 cubed.
Very few numbers are the sum of two cubes
in two different ways.
And this is the smallest number that
is the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
And Ramanujan just knew that.
He just plucked that from thin air.
He had a natural understanding of numbers.
He used to say that at night, while he was asleep,
one of the Hindu goddesses would write mathematical truths
on his tongue that would somehow become absorbed into his brain.
And he could just pluck these things from thin air.
And because it was one of the last conversations
that Ramanujan had before he left to go back to India,
and before he died, that conversation
has gone down in history.
And 1729 has gone down in mathematical folklore.
And that's why it keeps on appearing in "Futurama."
It's Ken Keeler's way of just acknowledging
this great genius, Ramanujan.
And it's kind of wonderful, I think,
that Ramanujan, some 100 years after he started corresponding
with Hardy is remembered in this way,
in this sci-fi animated sitcom called "Futurama."
It doesn't just stop there, because you can then ask, OK
that number's the smallest number that's
the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
You can then ask, well what number is the smallest
one that's a sum of two cubes in three different ways?
And you end up with an eight digit number,
something extraordinary, something like 83 million
or something.
But that number also appears in "Futurama."
It's called a taxicab number of order 3,
and it appears as a taxicab number in Futurama.
So I'm going to stop there, but we
do have 10 minutes, or a bit more, even,
if people have questions.
I've skipped over lot of things and may not
have explained things in complete detail.
So if people have questions, I think we have two microphones.
I'm very happy to try and answer as many as I can.
AUDIENCE: Does this work?
Yeah.
Hey, awesome seeing you here.
It's actually really awesome, because I saw you on YouTube
before, on Numberphile--
SIMON SINGH: Oh, great!
AUDIENCE: --talking about Fermat's Theorem.
So the question was, this is really cool stuff,
and can we look forward to seeing
more of this in a more popular medium than closed rooms?
SIMON SINGH: Oh, well, yeah.
I hope so.
The book's been published in the UK for about two weeks now.
And in the UK, the mainstream press have picked up on it,
radio shows have picked up on it,
the tabloid press have picked up on it.
There's something in the Huffington Post today.
So what's really nice is, OK, this is a big thick book,
and not many people may buy the book.
Not many people may come to talks like this.
But I think it'll get disseminated
through all these other media.
And I think the writers are really happy.
I called the book "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical
Secrets," but it's never been a secret.
The writers have never tried to hide this.
They've just put it in places where
people might not necessarily look.
And I think they're really pleased that people are now
noticing this.
I think one of the reasons they do
this is because they think of themselves when they were
teenagers and how they loved mathematics.
And maybe it was hard for them to find
ways to see other people loving mathematics.
And yet if you're a teenager now,
and you see "The Simpsons," and you
notice that there's a narcissistic number on there,
and you think, hang on, the people writing this
must love mathematics as much as I do.
And maybe it will make them feel better
about their love of mathematics.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I had a two part question.
The first part is, I assume that Matt Groening probably
has a lot of support for these kind of jokes
and he gives them a lot of encouragement.
And then the second part is, why don't other TV shows try and do
the same thing?
Seeing how popular "The Simpsons" is.
SIMON SINGH: Yes, I get the impression
that Matt Groening, from the very start,
gave writers the freedom to express
their particular interests.
So, again from that very, very first episode--
I call it the first episode, "Bart the Genius."
Bart's having lunch and one of the fellow students
opens a lunch box, and it's there for a split second.
But if you look carefully, it's an Anatoly Karpov lunch box.
Anatoly Karpov was world chess champion in the early '70s.
Not many people would necessarily know that.
He was also a mathematician-- not many people know that.
He also is responsible for auctioning the most valuable
stamp from the Belgian Congo.
Not many people know that either.
So that kind of niche know-- But the fundamental rule was,
these references must not get in the way of the jokes,
and they must not get in the way of the plot.
And so with the googolplex joke reference,
as I'm fairly sure Mike Reiss came up with that,
somebody around the writing table
said, yeah who's going to get that?
Nobody's heard of what a googolplex is.
And I think Mike Reiss responded, well, yeah,
maybe not many people will get it,
but how funny can you make the name of a cinema?
So you haven't lost anything, and maybe you gain something.
And then, why "The Simpsons" and why
"Futurama"-- I have a chapter in the book about why
mathematicians are involved in comedy.
And there are lots of them, not just within "The Simpsons."
But we have people in the UK, people like Dave Gorman,
people like Dara O Briain.
Tom Lehrer, the finest musical satirist of the 20th century.
There is a link between mathematics and comedy,
and I talk about that in the book.
But then I think I asked Al Jean,
but why have you all congregated here?
And there are a couple of reasons for that.
But I think the most interesting one was, Al Jean said that when
you do mathematics-- and he made a distinction
between mathematics, and science, and everything else.
And maybe with computer science as well.
That in mathematics and computer science,
whatever you write down happens.
Whatever line of logic you write down, the next line of logic
flows.
You are in complete control of what you are doing.
As a mathematician and as a computer scientist.
You are in control.
Whereas science is messy, and equipment breaks,
and the weather gets in the way, and you
don't have enough statistics.
So maths is pure and perfect, science
is impure and imperfect.
Animation is pure and perfect.
What you write in your script will be read.
What you draw on your storyboard will appear on screen.
Whereas with live action comedy, again, you're
dealing with the weather, you're dealing with directors,
you're dealing with actors and so on.
So he drew the parallel-- I think
his line was, he said that animation is a mathematician's
medium.
So maybe that explains why.
Yeah
AUDIENCE: Sorry to break the format.
This is not a question, but just an observation.
I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you for your work
with the protecting the right of authors and individuals
to present their opinions.
The Defamation Act this year, and of course, the BCA lawsuit.
So thank you.
SIMON SINGH: Thank you very much.
Just a bit of background in case people don't know.
But I mean, people like to think of England
as a kind of land of justice and fairness and free speech.
But we still actually have, as of today,
really quite harsh libel laws.
People from all over the world would come to London
to sue for libel.
It was the libel capital of the world.
You'd end up with Danish newspapers
being sued by Icelandic banks.
Ukrainian oligarchs suing Ukrainian newspapers.
All in London.
Ridiculous.
Saudi billionaire sued a New York author in London.
And it got so bad that your President actually
brought in a law that said, if you're an American,
you get sued in London, your assets are safe.
Because we have so little respect
for English law in terms of libel.
And that was really important because it actually
helped us begin to change our laws.
I got sued for libel, as did a few other people who
were science writers, health writers.
And people just thought it was ridiculous
that you can't write about science without being
sued for libel.
It was ridiculous.
In science, the way we move forward
in science, and many other areas,
is through robust argument and debate.
Anyway it took a few years, but eventually, we now
have a new defamation act, Defamation Act 2013,
which is much more reasonable.
And that will become law, literally in the next week
or two.
And what was really great about that was,
it was very much a grassroots campaign.
Because bloggers were getting sued for libel,
getting threatened with libel.
Local newspapers, online newsgroups.
We have an organization in Britain called Mumsnet, where
parents share their experiences.
They were getting threatened with libel.
It was ridiculous.
The only problem left, once this law becomes law
in the next week or two, is Northern Ireland.
Because Northern Ireland still isn't updating its laws yet.
And that could become the new libel capital of the world.
So you might find yourself being dragged to Belfast
if you say something which somebody doesn't like.
But thank you very much, thank you.
AUDIENCE: That guy kind of stole my thunder a little bit.
Thanks for coming and I've read all your books.
I read "The Code Book" twice.
Great book.
But I think the most important book you've written,
in my humble opinion, is "Trick or Treatment."
if I was king of the world, I'd make everyone read it.
And I'm curious to know, are you still
active in the science-based medicine community?
Do you do anything, are there any plans to update that book?
SIMON SINGH: Yeah, thank you very much for your kind words.
So my backgrounds in physics.
That's what I study, that's what I love.
Maths is kind of the same kind of thing, so I love maths.
I love writing about that.
But I ended up writing this book about alternative medicine
because-- couple of reasons.
One was, I had heard about students
going on their gap years.
Before going to college, they'd travel around the world.
And they would use homeopathy to protect themselves
against malaria.
And I couldn't believe this was true
so I asked a young student to go to 10 homeopaths.
And she said, I don't like using conventional treatment.
Can you give me something that I can use instead?
And 10 out of 10 homeopaths said, here,
use these sugar pills.
And her story was that she was going
to go to West Africa for 10 weeks
on a truck tour, where there are strains of malaria that
will kill you within three days.
And there are examples of people that use homeopathy
and who came back to Europe and suffered multiple organ
failure because of severe malaria.
So I was shocked that fairly bright young people
were being taken in by homeopathy.
So I sat down with a professor of complementary medicine,
in fact.
But a very rigorous scientist, what
we call evidence-based medicine is what he follows.
And so he's been examining alternative medicine
for the last 10 years.
And the alternative therapists hate him.
Because sometimes he finds something that works,
and he'll say that, because he's a good scientist.
But often he'll find things that don't work,
which aren't backed by evidence, and which
might even be dangerous.
So the alternative therapists hate him.
He was the world's first professor
of complementary medicine, and they
said, if you're a professor of complementary medicine,
you should be championing complementary medicine.
And he says, well, look, if I was a professor of toxicology,
I wouldn't be championing toxins.
It's not how it works.
So he and I, we wrote a book which
looked at all the different alternative therapies.
And one or two of them work, and we say that,
and most of them don't.
Some of them are particularly dangerous.
It was after writing that book that I wrote something
in a newspaper that that's why I got sued for libel.
And I still occasionally write about alternative medicine
and support one or two groups that
are involved in challenging alternative medicine.
So for example, right now we've got a horrendous magazine
in Britain called "What Doctors Don't Tell You,"
and you can buy it in your supermarket,
you can buy it at newspaper outlets.
And it essentially says that doctors have got secrets
that they're not telling you.
And we're going to tell you the real truth.
And it's just full of clap trap, and dangerous clap trap.
And people believe what's in it.
So we're currently talking to people to say--
and again, I'm very pro free speech.
So if supermarkets want to stock it and sell it,
I can't stop them.
And I shouldn't be able to ban them from doing it.
But I want these supermarkets to know what they are selling.
So that they're aware that, if they generally
have a policy of promoting good health
and supporting their customers in giving them
proper information, then do they really
want to be stocking this magazine?
That's their choice.
But it's one that I would caution them against.
So I'm still involved with those kind of campaigns
and those kind of issues.
So yes.
Thank you very, very much.
If people do have more questions,
I'm going to be here for five or ten minutes.
So please do come and say hello.
And thank you very much for coming.
Thank you.