I have been watching some episodes of this show recently and two scenes particularly caught my attention.
Firstly, Sheldon Cooper makes an unexpected reference to Gottlob Frege: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_TQea0aOnE(1:39)
Secondly, here is some dialogue from one scene:
Howard Wolowitz: [after everyone cheers for him and his team design going to space] It gets better! Someone has to go up with the telescope as a payload specialist, and guess who that someone is!
Sheldon Cooper: Mohammed Lee. [everyone’s looking confused]
Howard Wolowitz: Who’s Mohammed Lee?
Sheldon Cooper: Mohammed is the most common first name in the world, and Lee the most common surname. As I didn’t know the answer, I thought that’d give me a mathematical edge.
For someone who is supposed to be a genius, Sheldon seems not to be familiar with basic laws of probability. I think that this scene provides a cool example of the fact that it does not necessarily follow from two things A and B each having a relatively high probability below 1 that their conjunction shares a high probability.
In fact, it can be zero. I wonder if there are any Herman Lee’s out there.