7 Insanely Clever Simpsons Jokes That You Totally Missed
4. The JumboVision Maths Nerd Mother Lode (Marge And Homer Turn A Couple Play)
Rubbish episode, but massive maths gags abound. The three numbers flashed up on the JumboVision screen at an interval in a baseball game are apparently just three random figures pulled out of the air. However, with the writers being enormous maths nerds, they decided to have some fun with it. The first answer, 8,128, is the fourth perfect number; that is, the numbers it can be divided by add up to the number itself. The first perfect number is 6, because 1, 2 and 3 both divide into 6 and add up to 6. The second answer, 8208, is a narcissistic number. Narcissistic numbers are the sum of its own digits when raised to the power of the number of the digits; in the case of 8208, that means that each of its digits needs to be raised to the fourth power. So, 84 + 24 + 04 + 84 = 8,208. Narcissistic numbers are pretty rare, too - there are less than 100 numbers which qualify, and theres, like loads of numbers out there. The final answer, 8191, is a prime number, which is neat on its own but not really enough to satisfy the mathletes on The Simpsons writing staff. Happily, 8191 is also a Mersenne prime, named for the 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne, who first described the pattern 2p - 1, where p equals any prime number. 8191 is equal to 213 - 1, if you were wondering.
