Wired.com presents the Geek's guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 118 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Today on the show I'll be interviewing David X Cohen.

He was the head writer for the popular science fiction cartoon Futurama,

which he co-developed with Matt Graining,

Creator of The Simpsons. Futurama and The Simpsons are both full of math and

science jokes, which are explored in great detail in the new book, The Simpsons and their mathematical secrets by Simon Singh.

Recently, David and Simon have been traveling around together talking about the book and about some

of the math and science and futurama, and I'm really excited to talk about some of that stuff today with David.

So now here's our interview with David X Cohen.

All right, so we're here with David X Cohen. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

Happy to be here.

All right, so you co-developed Futurama

along with Matt Graining, and you guys wrote the pilot script together.

So first of all, why don't you just tell us a bit

about how that came about and how much of the larger story had you worked out at that point?

Well, the origin of Futurama is that I was a writer at The Simpsons for about five years, and about four years into that rumors started going around

that Matt Graining was working on the secret project, a secret science fiction project.

And I was very interested of, of course, being the Sci-Fi science nerd on the Simpson's

writing staff.

There were many, many other nerds on this.

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