Math cartoon

Futurama is a cartoon series that took place in the future, it could be watched on television screens between 1999 and 2013, and on some channels, reruns are still shown.

In the fifth episode of the sixth year, entitled The Duh-Vinci Code, the main characters searched for the hidden meanings of the Last Supper and, among other things, came across a code that read:

IIXI - (XXIII * LXXXiX)

The main character, of course, resolved her immediately, and the result was - one. The whole thing would be nothing worth mentioning if it were not for a rather interesting mathematical matter related to the so-called Mersen numbers.

Mersenne numbers are those obtained as a solution to the expression 2P-1, where P is a prime number. Let's take a look at some of the first solutions:

22 – 1 = 3 23 – 1 = 7 25 - 1 = 31 27 – 1 = 127 211 – 1 = 2047 …

The interesting thing about these numbers is that the result is also a prime number. Always? Almost always. The first one that does not give a prime number is 211 - 1. The solution is 2047, which is not a prime number, as it can be written as the product of 23 and 89. And what does this have to do with the code in the cartoon?

If we convert the notation in Roman numerals to decimal and solve it, we get:

*IIXI - (XXIII LXXXIX) = 211 - (23 89) = 2048 - 2047 = 1*

So they were right in the cartoon...

Source: Numberphile/YouTube

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