In the episode 2-D Blacktop from Futurama's tenth season, Professor Farnsworth invents a device that looks like a tesseract and takes his "hot rod" into the fourth dimension. When he collides with Leela's ship during a drag race on a giant Möbius strip, they end up in a 2-dimensional "flatland". In addition to referencing the classic mathematical fiction novel Flatland, they make intriguing observations about life in such a world (e.g. that creatures could not have a digestive tract like animals in our world do, because that would divide them into two unconnected pieces). The Professor uses his device again to return to 3-dimensions, passing briefly through an existence of fractional dimensional objects, fractals, before returning them home to New New York.
Many episodes of this science fiction cartoon series from Matt Groening include mathematical "in jokes". For an overview of mathematics in the series Futurama, see Sarah Greenwald's website Futurama Math and her recorded lecture lecture "Bite My Shiny Metal X".
|