Simon Singh
speaker
239 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2013
last heard Jan 2015
Simon Singh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The only research paper that Bill Gates has ever written was on the subject of pancake numbers.
And the other person that's published on this area is a chap called David X. Cohen.
And he's taken a slightly different version of that problem, which is not the simple pancake problem, but the burnt pancake problem.
In that scenario, you don't just want the pancakes in the right order.
You want them in the right orientation with the burnt side down.
So it's an even trickier version of the same problem.
And David X. Cohen is partly famous for looking at the burnt pancake problem, but he's even more famous because he's a writer of The Simpsons and co-creator of Futurama.
And he's one of these sneaky mathematical comedy writers who's been putting mathematics into those two TV shows, The Simpsons and Futurama.
Oh gosh, some of it's really obscure.
Things like Fermat's Last Theorem, the P versus NP problem.
This is an unsolved problem in mathematics.
It's worth a million dollars if you can solve it.
And it crops up in an episode called Treehouse of Horror 6.
In Futurama, we have Klein bottles, we have Möbius strips, we have the Aleph Null cinema.
Aleph Null is a scale of infinity, which suggests there are even bigger scales of infinity.
So all of this stuff is kind of just smuggled into the background of these two shows.
I find more or less hysterical.
You often make me titter as I listen to you.
But there is an animated show, I think SpongeBob SquarePants.
Does SpongeBob live in a pineapple at the bottom of the sea?
Showing 141–160 of 239 · page 8 of 12
← Previous
Next →