Futurama is coming back from cancellation yet once again thanks to Hulu. It's expected that the new episodes could be airing this summer! To celebrate the return of Fry, Bender and the gang I thought it would be fun to watch some old clips. An interesting fact is that one of the producers of the show, Ken Keeler has an PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard so they were careful to check their numbers in the show.
For those who have never seen the show it revolves around Fry who is accidentally frozen on New Year's Eve at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, 1999 and is thawed out in 2999. He befriends and evil robot by the name of Bender and works for his great....great nephew the Professor Farnsworth as a delivery boy. If you haven't seen it and like animated comedies it's a must see! The complete series is on Hulu.
In the episode: "A Fishfull of Dollars" Season 1 Episode 6, Bender is arrested and the gang are trying to bail him out of jail but are short by just cents. Fry then recalls that he had a bank account in 1999 with 97 cents in it which would cover the last part of the bail. He proceed to the bank to collect the 97 cents and the teller informs him that after 1000 years and an average interest rate of 2.25% the interest compounded his account to a value of $4.3 billion. Take a look:
Image from YouTube
Let's check the math. The formula for compound interest is:
Where FV is future value, PV is present value, r is the interest rate, and n is the number of periods. So in our case the present value is $0.97, our interest rate is 2.25% (placed into the equation as 0.025) and periods will be 1000 for years. What I get is $4,467,745,372.28, so the $4.3 billion might have been an underestimate. But it really demonstrates the power of compound interest!
In reality I don't think it could work for a few reasons. First with the banking crisis the bank likely won't exist in a thousand years. Secondly who knows if the dollar will even exist in a thousand years or even the country. Thirdly if the dollar still exist and the bank and the country whose to say that the dollar will be worth anything at that point? So I won't be leaving my descendants in a thousand years billions of dollars. Although I do wish my forefathers had left me that kind of inheritance!
I hoped you enjoyed my post and are looking forward to the return of Futurama like I am! I'm going to try to put up one or two Futurama post each week. Feel free to leave any comments or questions.
References:
https://www.mathsisfun.com/money/compound-interest.html
equation image from mathisfun.com
YouTube
