simpsonsmath.com
Baseball Attendance Figures

Marge and Homer Turn a Couple Play Original Airdate: May 21, 2006.
The attendance figures:
8191 is a Mersenne prime, a prime number of the form 2n-1 (8191 = 213 - 1).
8128 is the 4th perfect number, which is the sum of its proper positive divisors (8128 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 127 + 254 + 508 + 1016 + 2032 + 4064)
8208 is a 4-narcissistic number: one of only three non-trivial numbers that can be written as the sum of fourth powers of its digits: 8208=84 + 24 + 04 + 84

The correct answer: "Its c) as in keeping together..."
It was fun to be able to attend a table read for this episode on August 25th, 2005 with my co-author Andrew Nestler. The attendance numbers were different at that point, but were changed afterwards to be mathematically interesting in honor of us:
From an August, 2005 interview:
Jeff Westbrook It's great you guys came by, because it really did light a little fire under us to some degree and today we put in some slightly more interesting mathematical numbers in honor of your visit. It was Ian Maxtone Graham's idea: "Oh, we should totally do that because those people were here."
From an October, 2005 MSRI panel:
Jeff Westbrook Recently on "The Simpsons" we did deliberately put in a little math joke in honor of Sarah, actually, because she came to a table read... The episode is about Homer and his wife helping a baseball player and his wife. It's at the baseball stadium. She's talking over the PA system while her husband is about to hit a ball and she says, ok, I'll go back with you if you can tell me which of these three numbers is today's attendance figure, so we went back after Sarah was there, and in honor of her, made them three somewhat interesting integers.

We were thrilled to (coincidentally) attend a wonderful orchestral scoring session for the same episode on May 12, 2006, and see the new numbers there.


Dr. Sarah J. Greenwald, Appalachian State University



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