My wife is a journalist as well, and she understood. I had enough money I knew this is right so you can’t bully me. They target children! So if I apologise, then I’m saying that “Oh, actually this does work.” And that’s not true.īy that stage I had written three international bestsellers, so I knew I wouldn’t be destroyed. It’s the most ridiculous thing! So I said it is stupid and irresponsible. And I had to appeal three times.Ĭhiropractors, they believe that the health of everything in your body is dictated by your spine, so if your spine is slightly wrong it will give you asthma, diabetes, ear infections. But for a very long time, I thought I was going to lose because the initial judge said I was wrong. I won the case, so the other side had to pay nearly all my costs.

But you spent £3,00,000 on the case! Why didn’t you just say sorry? I co-authored a book with a professor of alternate medicine and then I got sued for libel. Then, I got angry about alternative medicine. And when you realise that you have mathematics and The Simpsons, it’s an obvious idea for a book and I couldn’t resist it! Then I realised it was David X Cohen, and that there are lots of people and they’re all doing it.

Ten years ago, I saw an episode of The Simpsons that featured an equation from Fermat’s Last Theorem and I thought, wow! Somebody on this team knows some mathematics. The Simpsons is a great show and very humorous, but there’s real maths in it! Some of the maths in the book is more complicated than the maths I’ve done in my other books! And just when they think it’s perfect, they do the read-through with the actors and they always want someone in the room because that tells them whether it’s really funny. They write a script, go through it about six times, changing it. I sat through one of their recordings, what they call a read-through. They’d read some of my books, they knew what I did, I obviously knew what they did. I spent a week with them and that was great, they gave me new ideas. I tried to pick the most interesting parts, something about the history of mathematics, something about the future, something about the show. I tried to identify all the examples of mathematics in The Simpsons. He came to India the first time when he was eight – they couldn’t afford to visit sooner. England is where he was born and grew up. His grandfather – originally from a village in Punjab – migrated to Britain in 1938. Turns out, some of the writers of the series are math geeks and have been smuggling complex mathematics into the show more often than you would believe.Įven more interestingly, he’s Indian. His latest book, The Simpsons And Their Mathematical Secrets is about advanced mathematics in The Simpsons (that’s right, the hilarious animated series about the dysfunctional American fictional family, the Simpsons).

The simpsons and maths