Author(s): Simon Singh

ATLAS & REFERENCE

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.