Maybe donuts are brain food... That could explain how Homer Simpson figured out an equation that predicts the mass of the Higgs boson - in 1998!

"That equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson," Simon Singh, author of the book "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets," told The Independent. "If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that's only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is. It's kind of amazing as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered."

"'The Simpsons' is the most mathematical TV show on prime-time television in history," Singh added, according to The Independent. "A lot of the writers on 'The Simpsons' are mathematicians."

Singh also said that the formula written by Homer while trying to come up with inventions like the electric hammer and makeup gun are also pretty close to the God particle equation.

"One of the equations relates to Fermat's Last Theorem, and my first book was about all about this notorious equations, so leapt out of the screen," Singh told The Independent. "My Ph.D. is in particle physics, so I was similarly shocked by Homer's equation predicting the mass of the Higgs boson."

One of the writers for that episode, David X. Cohen, had a friend involved in the Higgs research, so the equation was snuck onto the blackboard, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail. Cohen, who wrote for "The Simpsons" for five years, studied physics at Harvard University and got his masters in computer science at University of California, Berkley. Cohen and his high school buddy, David Schiminovich, an astronomer at Columbia University who was involved in the Higgs' research, came up with the equation for Homer's blackboard.

"The Simpsons has many mathematicians on its writing team, including Al Jean, who worked on the very first series and who pretty much runs the show today," Singh said, according to The Daily Mail. "He was such a brilliant young mathematician that he went to Harvard University when he was only sixteen years old."

"If a nerdy teenager spots the maths in 'The Simpsons,' I hope that he or she will think that maths is rightly cool," said Singh, according to The Daily Mail. "'The Simpsons' is cool, the writers of 'The Simpsons' are cool, and if they like maths then maths must be cool. I think the show gives a big endorsement of nerd culture."