The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets Paperback – October 14, 2014

I would like to think I am not a nerd, but I KNOW I am not a math whiz. In fact, I would label myself as "challenged" in this area. Neither am I a particular fan of the show, although when I have watched it I've found it funny and enjoy the targeted humor. So I'm not sure what attracted me to buy this book, but having it, I am reading it with enormous delight! Singh uses the tv show The Simpsons as the hook to investigate and explain all sorts of mathematical concepts -- both complicated and relatively simple -- in ways that even I can understand and see the humor, logic, importance and at times, application of. (I know, don't end a sentence with a preposition. Maybe I am a nerd, after all!) Although, I must amend that last sentence, I still don't see the practical application of prime numbers, but maybe by the end of the book I will? There are explanations and anecdotes which prompt laugh-out-loud reactions, and Singh's writing has a dry humor and is clear. For fans of the Simpsons it will expand their appreciation of just how intelligent and clever the writing is, but even if you are not a fan of the show, the book really is mostly focused on the delights of mathematics. Get the book and read it!

This is a very professional, well written, pleasant book. It recalls brief elements of various Simpsons and Futurama episodes and intersperses these with longer, chatty accounts of various mathematical matters. The Simpsons are brilliant, Singh is a very successful author, and who doesn’t like mathematics? So the idea of this book must have seemed like a sure winner. But it doesn’t work perfectly. The problems with the book are all minor, but together they produce a somewhat unsatisfactory overall result. There are some interesting behind-the-scenes information about the making of the Simpsons, but not as much as one would have hoped. A lot of mathematical material is stock standard, of the kind one would find in many books, so there isn’t much in it that is original or interesting. And none of the mathematical ideas are explored in any depth at all. There are a lot of standard math jokes in the book, but they are mostly old and tired. And sadly it’s not great from an educational point of view. The level of math, which is always superficial, is rather uneven. At times the reader is told not to “feel guilty” if they skip over some trivial arithmetic that is included in the book. But then later the reader is required to digest factorials and exponentials. As for the content, there are occasionally interesting things, like the pancake sorting problem, but they appear in a sea of utter trivia, like the definition of “googolplex” or the idiotic notion of the Erdos-Bacon number. Occasionally, some parts irritated me. For example, the treatment of the on-base plus slugging percentage is disappointing; the book doesn’t discuss this metric at all, leaving the impression that it is a natural statistical measure. Also, while the Simpsons writers are undoubtedly wonderfully gifted individuals, Singh consistently exaggerates their mathematical bona fides; it seems that according to Singh, a “mathematician” is anyone who has dropped out of a math course. Anyway, despite the above litany of complaints, I did actually enjoy the book. Certainly not Singh’s best book, but definitely still worth reading.

I've been watching The Simpson's since I was a child, I believe around season 3 up until I got into college and simply had no time for them anymore. Stumbling around and watching youtube videos I recently came across a channel called Numberphile. This is man that introduced to me about his book, Simon Singh (what an interesting hairstyle I'll add to that).Simon Singh got on, and within seconds into the video he blew my mind that The Simpson's writers were sneaking in bits of math in nearly every episode, this whole time, underneath my radar! And to think, the most obvious of them all was when Bart Simpson cheated off of Martin (well swapped exams) was littered with math gags from the start to finish and I just blew it off because it was a theme of that episode, ahh just a gifted school with lots of math- I didn't think much of it. All I'm going to say is "RD=RR." You'll definitely get it once you put in a little research which all sources came from this book.I loved it how Homer Simpson defies two of the greatest mathematicians in history. Where he scribbles a solutions to Fermat's last theorem where the exponent, n, has a solution where n>2. Take a moment, this is Homer Simpson who is defying these people.I loved the reference of Apu and how he was able to recite pie to the 40,000th decimal place and the behind of the scenes of what it took to get a hold of that number.This book is wonderful, it's amazing, but certainly it's a surprising yellow book. Math and comedy? Who would have guessed?I had a wonderful discussion/time with my math professor about this, and she was laughing and was also in shocked, she too is a fan of The Simpsons and like many of us, she had no idea this was going on.This is definitely a book I love, and there are a few things in my life that I have purchased and was satisfied.*off topic* an example, I bought a coffee machine thinking that I'll stop spending money at retail coffee shops, did it happen? Nope, I ended up spending more and having in-taking more coffee! go figure.

This book will please those who enjoy both math and good sitcoms. The book is well written with numerous references to several shows from the last 20 years. It is really remarkable the amount of math talent in the Simpsons' creative team. The book is not really a deep treatise on mathematics but has excellent pointers and references that can guide the reader to study some of them in further reading. Take it as a good and light scientific reading for a weekend and you'll have a good time.If you get the book's jokes you are entitled to some kind of Ph.D. on math humor so don't skip the tests ... I didn't get the PhD but at least a got good scores up to the MsC on math humor.