The funny science fiction TV show Futurama heavily relies on mathematics, which comes as no real surprise when it’s written by maths geeks.
Many of the writers on Futurama also wrote for The Simpsons, which also incorporates plenty of maths jokes into episodes.
Big fans of Futurama may have noticed that writers insert maths jokes into pretty much every episode.
Take the episode based on a fourth-dimensional space whale named ‘Möbius Dick' to 'The Route of All Evil' which features a maths oddity called Klein Bottle, a branch of mathematics.
Futurama writers clearly like to keep viewers on their toes, while slipping in a few maths jokes is clever, creating a whole new maths theory is even more mind-blowing.
That’s not all though, writer Jeff Westbrook also created a mathematical language for the series, which we first saw in season four, episode five, ‘Leela’s Homeworld’.
The language known as ‘Alienese’ was based on a maths cipher, which in the maths world is known as an algorithm that converts data to a form that is not directly readable.
Jeff Westbrook, whose PhD thesis was titled ‘Algorithms and Data Structures for Dynamic Graph Algorithms’ came up with the clever lingo.
He even decided to create ‘AL2’ (alien language two) which was a more advanced mathematical language.
It appeared in almost every episode of Futurama.
Which episode featured the mathematical theory?
In the sixth season, The Prisoner of Brenda episode involved a brain-switching machine that swaps the minds of two people that enter it.
Once it’s been used, the device can’t be used twice to exchange the same two minds.
As everyone switches, there’s a lot of mathematics and logic involved for everyone to get their brains back.
According to Mental Floss, writer Ken Keeler who has a PhD in maths wrote the original theory just for that one singular episode.
It was titled ‘Keeler’s Theorem and Products of Distinct Transpositions’.
The theory proves that regardless of how many mind switches between two bodies have been made, they can still all be restored to their original bodies using only two extra people.
These two people must not have had any mind switches prior though.
In short, Keeler came up with a whole new algorithm himself and that, combined with subtle yet complex mathematical jokes, is what makes Futurama such a clever animated series.