The San Francisco Chronicle’s reader’s editor wrote a delightful Friday column about a long-delayed correction that required some very powerful computations. Throw in a bit of Homer Simpson and you’ve got a winner. (We would have brought it to you on Friday but our blog provider was having problems that day and we couldn’t log in.)
Homer math catches up with the news
Dick Rogers
AMONG THE HUNDREDS of corrections that crossed my desk this year en
route to their home on Page 2, one didn’t make it. It’s still right
here, buried until recently under a pile of papers.
So even though the story that contained the error is two months old, I
owe it to my conscience to set the record straight — and tell a larger
truth about the paper and its readers.
It began with a charming little article Oct. 15 by staff writer Steve
Rubenstein that told how three writers for "The Simpsons" TV show –
all math scholars — managed to weave mathematical references into
episodes of the cartoon.
Rubenstein mentioned that Homer Simpson, "in a dream, wrote that 1,782
to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 1,922 to the 12th
power." So far, so good. The trouble started with the two words that
followed in parentheses: "It does."
It wasn’t long before math mavens set the paper straight.
The equation clearly is false, they said, citing a not-very- clear but
apparently proven theory by 17th-century mathematician Pierre de
Fermat. For those of us who aren’t Fermat followers, Sonoma State
University math professor Rick Luttmann puts it more plainly: "Do you
believe the following?
"The product of evens is even.
"The product of odds is odd.
"The sum of an even and odd is odd.
"Then behold: 1,782 to the 12th is a product of evens, hence even.
"1,841 to the 12th is a product of odds, hence odd.
"Their sum is an even plus an odd, hence odd.
"But 1,922 to the 12th is a product of evens, hence even.
"No number is both even and odd, so the equality cannot hold."
I do believe, I do believe, as Cowardly Lion said in "The Wizard of Oz." So off to the city desk I went in search of a correction. Dutifully, the desk wrote that the left side of the equation really didn’t equal the right side.
Hold on, said Deputy Managing Editor Stephen R. Proctor. What did it
equal? Shrugs all around. But without the answer, Proctor said, the correction doesn’t correct.
Once again, Sonoma State came to the rescue. Using a sophisticated
computer program called Mathematica, Associate Professor of Mathematics
Sam Brannen calculated the numbers. So thanks to him, here is the
long-overdue correction:
A story Nov. 15 about mathematical references on "The Simpsons" TV show
mistakenly said that 1,782 to the 12th power plus 1,841 to the 12th
power equals 1,922 to the 12th power. Actually, 1,782 to the 12th power
plus 1,841 to the 12th power equals 2,541,210,258,614, 589,176,288,
669, 958, 142, 428, 526,657, while 1,922 to the 12th power equals
2,541,210,259,314,801,410, 819, 278,649, 643,651,567,616.
Obviously.
The bigger context is that for most of what’s published in The
Chronicle, someone outside the paper knows the subject at least as
well. In the Internet age, interactivity — what we call "reader
feedback" — has become a buzzword, but it’s key to newspapers, too.
There’s not enough room in this column to credit readers with all the
course-correcting feedback they give. As long as we’re on the topic of
numbers, though, let me acknowledge the awful reality: When it comes to
math concepts, readers show again and again that The Chronicle has
nothing on Homer Simpson.
Just this year, readers have pointed out that stories about trends in
gasoline prices often failed to adjust for inflation, giving a
distorted picture of the changes. Others, citing a story about
University of California admissions, noted that the paper referred to
the 37.6 percent proportion of white students as the majority. Whenever
a story includes numbers, it’s a good bet that readers will
double-check the arithmetic. In an article on driving speeds, for
example, the paper asserted that a commuter driving 30 miles to work at
65 mph instead of 75 mph would spend roughly 3 1/2 minutes more per day
on the road. But reader Andrew Gross of Union City accurately noted
that most workers also drive home after their day’s toils. Therefore,
the added time on the road would be more like 7 minutes.
It’s no accident that a Web search on "journalists" and "mathematics"
turns up a trove of terrific sites devoted to helping the likes of me
to understand percentages, statistical concepts, rates of change and
more.
When journalists do master the power of numbes[Editor's Note: Yup, that's a typo from the original column], the results are
formidable. Consider the current series of Chronicle stories on
University of California pay practices. Using basic database skills and
a mastery of math, staff writers Todd Wallack and Tanya Schevitz
produced an exhaustive account of UC’s refusal to level with the public
about the ways it compensates its top employees.
Homer Simpson would be impressed.
P.S.: If you want to know more about the countless ways that numbers
figure in the news, read John Allen Paulos’ entertaining and accessible
book "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper" (Anchor, 1996).
