mathematics in the year 3008

One of the special features on the DVD to the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Score is an honest to goodness math lecture. I am not making this up. The math lecture is given by Appalachian State professor Sarah Greenwald, who explains the extremely subtle math references on Futurama, which is written by PhDs in math and computer science. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it really is a math lecture — a P and NP reference is only reference that could pass as an OR reference. If you don’t want to rent the DVD, you can check out Futuramamath.com and read this article in Math Horizons, which basically summarizes everything in the math lecture.