7 Insanely Clever Simpsons Jokes That You Totally Missed
2. Solving Fermats Last Theorem (The Wizard Of Evergreen Terrace)
The second line of Homers chalkboard scribblings reads: 3,98712 + 4,36512 = 4,47212 That looks suspiciously like gibberish, but its actually an answer to the most famous equation in all of mathematics: Fermats Last Theorem. The theorem is deceptively simple in its construction - a n + b n = c n when n is greater than 2 - but incredibly difficult to actually answer. Its the mathematical equivalent of getting a text at 10.30pm which just says Hey u still up??. You know its probably a booty call, but how cool should you play it? And what happens if you reply saucily but its an innocent attempt to compare notes on Storage Hunters? Its a minefield. In fact, it was thought that Fermats Last Theorem actually had no answer and was impossible to prove, not least by Fermat himself. It eventually took a British mathematician, Sir Andrew John Wiles, seven years of his life and over 150 pages of equations to prove that it could be solved, 358 years after it was first proposed. Wiles certainly earned his knighthood. The thing is, if you stick Homers solution into a standard calculator, itll look very much like a working solution which disproves Fermats supposition. Thats all down to some wonky rounding that happens as a result of the standard calulators 10-digit display, but David X. Cohen actually wrote a computer programme which would find him a close enough answer to freak out nerds who followed the equation. As if that wasnt enough, theres another reference to Fermats Last Theorem in the Treehouse of Horror VI mini-episode Homer3, wherein an equation whizzes past the three-dimensional Homer. It reads: 1,78212 + 184112 = 192212 Thats fairly easy to prove as untrue, but as a way of showing mathletes that the world Homer finds himself in is fundamentally weird its extremely succinct. As a bonus piece of nerdism, therea piece of hexadecimal code in the background which translates as Frink rules.
