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I had written this paper on pancake numbers with help from my adviser, Manuel Blum, who's a well-known computer scientist, and we submitted it to a journal called Discrete Applied Mathematics. I subsequently left graduate school to come and write for The Simpsons. After the paper was accepted, there was an extremely long lag between it being submitted, revised, and published. So, by the time the paper was published, I had been working at The Simpsons for a while, and Ken Keeler had also been hired at that point. So, finally the research article appeared, and I came in with the reprints of this article and I said, 'Hey, I've got an article in Discrete Applied Mathematics.' Everyone was quite impressed except Ken Keeler, who said, 'Oh yeah, I had a paper in that journal a couple of months ago.'"
With a wry smile on his face, Cohen bemoaned: "What does it mean that I come to write for The Simpsons and I cannot even be the only writer on this show with a paper in Discrete Applied Mathematics?
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