A fun trip with the “ultimate TV vehicle for pop culture mathematics.”
Higher math for dummies, courtesy of The Simpsons.
Perhaps Simpsons nerds have known this all along, but for the rest of us who think of the TV show as primarily a sharp piece of comic writing, it may come as a surprise to learn that it is riddled with sophisticated mathematics, including rubber sheet geometry, the puzzle of Rubik’s Cube, Fermat’s last theorem (“embedded within a narrative that explores the complexities of higher-dimensional geometry”), Mersenne prime numbers and plenty of other obscure material. Often in the show, this will fly by as sight gags, but just as often it is faced head-on, as when Lisa tackles statistics or Homer ponders three dimensions. Singh (Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, 2005, etc.) is a lively writer with an easy, unthreatening manner who takes readers smoothly through some fairly thorny mathematics. He also dives into the curious relationship between mathematics and comedy writers: It appears that most Simpsons writers graduated from Harvard with a degree in mathematics, and nearly all were on the staff of the Lampoon. Singh finds them possessed of a desire “to drip-feed morsels of mathematics into the subconscious minds of viewers.” One of the show’s writers put it simply: “The process of proving something has some similarity with the process of comedy writing, inasmuch as there’s no guarantee you’re going to get to your ending.” The author includes plenty of solid, vest-pocket profiles of both the show’s writers and great mathematicians of the past—e.g., Zu Chongzhi, Sophie Germain, Leonhard Euler—as well as a look at Matt Groening’s Simpsons spawn, Futurama, a show about a futuristic delivery service with enough nerdy references to sink a spaceship.
A fun trip with the “ultimate TV vehicle for pop culture mathematics.”Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-277-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A California surgeon explores the striking parallels in the evolution of Western art and science in this enlightening exploration of where ideas come from and how they enter the consciousness of a culture. Though art and science are traditionally considered antithetical disciplines—with art dependent on intuition for its development and science on logic and sequential thinking—both nevertheless rely on an initial burst of inspiration regarding the nature of reality, and in Western culture the two have followed separate but remarkably similar paths. Shlain offers detailed anecdotes from the history of Western culture—from the ancient Greeks' penchant for single-melody choruses and blank rectangles, through the fragmented art and science of the Medieval period, to modern art's redefinition of reality and the relativity revolution in science—to illustrate how major movements in art have generally preceded scientific breakthroughs based on equivalent ideas, despite the artists and scientists involved having remained largely ignorant of one another's work. Shlain's suggestion that scientists have not so much been inspired by artists but have received initial inspiration from the same source—bringing to mind the possibility of a universal mind from which such ideas spring—is an intriguing one that offers a new window through which to view the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. A fascinating and provocative discussion—slow in coalescing but worth the wait. (Seventy-two b&w photographs and 15 diagrams.)
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-09752-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A hilariously suave (previously unpublished) morality tale from the master of understated mayhem and apocalypse (The Unstrung Harp, p. 572, etc.). Its wonderfully dark pictures and text detail a dream journey undertaken, at century’s end, by dull-looking Edmund Gravel and an accompanying arachnoid figure, the Bahhumbug, to a “remote provincial town” where polite society’s veneer is blithely whisked away and assorted beautiful people are revealed in all their mendacity, folly, and awful bad luck. As always, Gorey’s trademark rhyming couplets are filled with inexplicably funny, sad, and somehow beautiful occurrences (e.g., “Sir U___ fell from a speeding train,/Which did some damage to his brain,/And after that he did not know /How to pronounce the letter O”). Calling this delightful tale its author’s “Vision of Judgment” or Inferno would be like breaking a butterfly on a wheel—with which image, come to think of it, Gorey might do something ineffably sinister and entertaining.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100514-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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