The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

Abstract

This chapter is an excerpt from the book The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets written by Simon Singh.

Just a Few Words

Michele Emmer

Simone Singh directed his film Fermat’s Last Theorem for the Horizon series of the BBC in 1996. In 1997 he wrote the book by the same title, Fermat’s Last theorem. In 1997 I was planning the second Venice conference on Mathematics and Culture, and as I had the occasion to see the film, I had the idea to invite Simon Singh to the meeting. The conference took place at the end of march 1998 at the Auditorium Santa Margherita of the University of Ca’ Foscari, where I was professor for 7 years. He gave a talk on L’ultimo teorema di Fermat. Il racconto di scienza del decennio. The second volume of the Proceedings was published in Italian only by Springer Italia in 1999. The English version of the proceedings started only with the conference of the following year, in 1999. With Simon we became friends almost immediately.

The film Fermat’s Last Theorem was presented to the Math Film Festival in Bologna in 2000 together with a special conference for the World Year of Mathematics and the Proceeding were published by Springer in Italian and in English, Mathematics, Art, Technology and Cinema, Springer verlag, 2003. John Lynch, producer of the series Horizon, came to present the film.

Singh came again in 2001 and he gave a talk on L’emergere della narrativa scientifica, in a special session on Literature together with Apostolos Doxiadis and Denis Guedj. The Proceedings were published in Italian in 2002. Singh’s paper was published in English in the special issue Mathematics and Culture II. Visual Perfection: Mathematics and Creativity, Springer verlag, in 2005. This volume was in reality the second part of the volume The Visual Mind 2: Art and Mathematics I edited for MIT Press, published in 2004. When I asked authors from all over the world to send me papers for this volume I received so many interesting papers that at the end the number of pages was more than 1200. So I was obliged to divide the original volume in two books, one published by MIT Press the other by Springer.

Simon Singh came again in 2007 and gave the talk Mettere in scena la matematica published in Italian in the Proceedings by Springer Italia in Matematica e cultura 2008. We made also a video during the conference, 35 minutes, and Simon gave a short interview in it.

And again in 2017, Simon accepted to come once more to speak of his book on mathematics and the Simpsons. He was very kind to give the permission to reproduce the first chapter of the book in the Proceedings.

I want to thank again Simon for his kindness and friendship.

Reproduced with permission from © Simon Singh, 2013, ‘The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets’, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.