What do real mathemeticians think of the concepts and ideas about math on the CBS show “Numbers”? Is it pretty good or just “Hollywood”?
You’ll get a better answer in Cafe Society I think.
But I can’t imagine that there is a mathematician who seems to be an expert on just about everything that comes his way like that.
I’ve a commerce degree with a major in management information sciences (i.e. statistics) and the mathematician’s uncanny ability to predict the crook’s next move based on three or four observations is bullshit with a 99% confidence level 19 times out of 20.
I’m a student, but a quite mathematically minded one. I’ve seen Numbers (or Numb3rs) a few times and they usually base the episode around a mathematical theory I’ve at least heard of, if not one I’m somewhat familiar with. The general concept, that this theory would apply to this crime, is usually pretty accurate, but then they just have the main character talk really fast and write a bunch of equations on a chalkboard. It’s like magic. Not that the show has any obligation to be educational, but if they just spent a bit more time delving into the actual math, showing the meaning of the equations, I’d like it a little better. As it is, it’s sort of like:
- Crime
- Math
- ???
- Solved!
Just my two cents.
Heh! That’s a pretty good summary, right there. I don’t follow the show closely, but I catch it now and again. I think that the show is neat in that it highlights how math can be used to solve “real-world” problems. (It’s a good PR move for Math. I’m glad he decided to modernize his image. You know, shave off the beard, get a hip haircut, stop mumbling to himself, go out and meet people…)
I can’t say that the math is being applied correctly, but they are vague enough that I could forgive the writers. (They are being smart and not getting too in detail; that would open them up for being very wrong.) I may smirk when I catch phrases like “I applied fluid dynamics equations to the economics problem.” But, I can suspend my disbelief that far. (I probably couldn’t if they showed some bogus calculations.)
I’ve caught most of the episodes and spend most of the time throwing things at the television. The only really solid math they had was when they mentioned the Riemann Hypothesis, and that was mostly in the graphs they drew of the critical strip that made me say “RH” before they mentioned it.
oh, and strictly speaking it’s “NUMB3RS”.
I thought the first season had a little more reality to it, like expecting the serial killer’s crimes to form a sphere around his home. My impression is that most of the math is pretty much “real” but the application to the real world is very stretched. “Like magic,” as TJude says. Example: Yes, a bullet travels in a parabolic trajectory, but that doesn’t mean that you can pinpoint the location of the marksman by knowing where the bullet landed.
Second season has been much more “magic” and much less math.
On t’other hand, I take it as science fiction, so if I think of the math as technobabble, then the shows are fun: they’re just talking about probability distributions instead of dilithium crystals.
PS - My PhD was in theoretical math, and I worked for an actuary for several years, but I’m really out of touch with current math theory, so I may be more accepting of the technobabble than Mathochist, who is currently immersed.
In this Friday’s episode, Charlie devises an algorithm to predict the next time you throw something at the television.
I think TJDude hit the nail on the head with the math. However, they could base an episode around the fact that 2+2=7 and I’d still watch it for Navi Rawat. I think she’s absolutely beautiful (and smart, too!)
It’s not about being current or not, in my opinion. Nobody seriously thinks dilithium is anything but a writer’s daydream. Either a show like NUMB3RS will make people think mathematics is as phantasmagorical as science fiction, or it will make them think that what’s shown has any relation besides terminology to real mathematics. There’s a great disservice to the field to be done here that isn’t a risk to the (nonexistent) crop of contemporary dilithium miners.
If it weren’t for the fact that mathematics is so low as is, I’d be more upset.
He’s unshaven and unkempt. If that’s “modern”, give me the '50s.
If you think they haven’t you haven’t been paying attention to what he writes on the board.
IIRC, I said in one of last year’s threads on the show that I thought the writers would have a tough time coming up with plausible plotlines. This season’s shows have been so weak in their plots that we’re already seeing that. Last year the math was more solidly integrated into the solution. This year we’re getting more CSI magic forensics - recreating the timing of how long an unknown quantity of ice needed to melt a certain extent to the correct fifteen minutes? - than applied math.
Compared to anything else on network prime-time television, the depiction of math calls for cheers. The show portrays it as important, relevant, and a discipline that can be mastered even if sometimes arcane, just like the law or medicine. That’s far better than anything I can remember.
My guess as to what’s happening, from too much bitter experience with other shows, is that they’re getting a lot of pressure to back off from the math and make the show feel more like the other cop shows to attract a wider audience. This never works, and only in Hollywood would any executives keep making the same mistake.
If the show survives to a third season, it’ll be a shell of what made people tune in to it in the first place. And they’ll wonder where the audience went and blame the math.
The show has a few mathematicians on staff who help the writers and also one who is Charlie’s stunt hands. Apparently when they shoot his hands writing on the chalk boards he can’t get the finicky jabbing motion that is realistic so the mathematician does it for him.
Here’s an interesting link: http://the-adam.dyndns.org:8080/adam/numb3rs/one.htm
“Realistic”, my ass. It’s a bit of business making up part of the character. Everyone has his own board-style, and only some of them are of this stereotype.
As examples: Gregg Zuckerman writes in a fluid script very slowly and deliberately. Igor Frenkel shakes his hand in a sort of physical stutter, but strokes the board glancingly when he does make a mark. Mikhail Kapranov waves his hand past the board, only incidentally transferring a mark to the slate.
I disagree on two counts.
1.) Dilithium is a stable form of Lithium. I’m not saying that it will run a spaceship, but it can exist.
2.) Phantasmagorical Sci Fi can certainly have its place in influencing what people study. Which of these shows will get people at least tangentially interested in math?
[list=a]
[li] A show where some math wiz uses math to solve federal crimes.[/li]
[li] A show where some math wiz uses math to predict insurance rates. [/li][/list]
(Meaning no offence; one of my firends is finishing her BS in math and is looking into actuary…ism…ation…thingie.)
I stand by my earlier opinion: This is actually a good thing for math; just like the “science” in MacGuyver was a good thing to get people interested in science. (Hey, I wanted to learn to be able to make bombs like he did!)
I’ve only seen one episode of the show, but I remember thinking that they were using mathematics the way Deanna Troi often used her telepathy–to discern the obvious.
COP: Where could the killer be?
MATH GUY: Well, applying the theorem of (lots of mathematical mumbo jumbo and pretty graphics) he should be at this address.
COP: Hey, that’s the address from the business card we found stuffed into the victim’s mouth!
OK, maybe not quite that obvious.
Don’t shoot the messenger now, I was just relaying the info I had heard from articles and teh intarweb.
Just curious, Mathochist, do you agree with me (and Exapno) that the first season tried to hook to some sort of reality, but the second season is pretty much pure technobabble?
I didn’t mean to compare math to mining, although that’s certainly what I said. I mean “dilithium crystals” as a technobabble that infused the physics and astronomy of STAR TREK. That is, when the STAR TREK crew got into trouble, the solution was often for the Chief Engineer to realign the transporter to frabble the incadescent dilithium and create a hyper-glucocimine warp, that would de-energize the Klingons. That is, they’d escape by technobabble. I think the NUMB3RS plots are similar. It doesn’t matter what they say, really.
On the old STAR TREK, they didn’t care whether the “science” was anywhere close to reality. Later, they tried to stick to at least consistency. As such shows became more common, they’ve tried more and more to pretend the technobabble is “real,” hence NUMB3RS uses real terms like Riemann, and string theory, and combinatorial… but it’s still just technobabble. That’s what I was trying to say.
In one episode Charlie announced that he had solved some problem or another through “FOR-ee’-er” analysis. He went on to explain that he had analyzed the frequencies present in the data and . . .
:smack: Fourier. It’s pronounced fo®-YAY.
Well, okay, it’s French, so I probably pronounce it wrong, but the thing is, I pronounce it like other f’in’ English-speaking physicists and astronomers prounounce it. And it’s not like it’s some sort of obscure techique. Everybody learns it as an undergrad, for fuck’s sake. Learns how to do it, and how to fucking pronounce it. I dunno, it yanked me out of suspended disbelief, and I don’t know if I ever found my way back.
But, whatever. Maybe mathematicians all pronounce it FOR-ee’-er . . .
Ugh, and at the end of the first season, was it, when everybody was like “Ooooooh, your grad student liiiiiiikes yooooooooooo! You should daaaaate her!” I was like What. The. Fuck. I mean, to Charlie’s credit, he didn’t, but I couldn’t beleive nobody was saying, “Um, hello, he’s her THESIS ADVISOR? Can you say completely inappropriate!?” And then she switched to a different advisor, and suddenly it’s open season!? Um, NO? Still incredibly sketchy! Not like it doesn’t happen, but it shouldn’t be touted as acceptable behaviour!
For a long time, I kept watching just because I was amused with Peter McNicol. He plays a hammy and Hollywood-quirky physicist, but I’m still convinced that he’s a smart person and he knows a little bit about being a scientist. His character sounds a truthful note, anyway, unlike scientists on other shows who you can tell are scientists because they are constantly announcing, “I am a scientist! Therefore I think/do/feel X,Y, and Z!”
But at some point annoyance with the shallowly-treated math and the contrived action scenes overwhelmed the enteretainment value. I’d really love to see more math, treated with more depth, more real graphs, and fewer interpretive computer graphics, but I (and the other thread participants) are part of a vanishingly small demographic. The hubby still tivos it, so I guess he’s getting something out of it . . .
Heh, reminds me of an episode of Due South (a highly under-rated show, by the way, infinitely better than Numb3rs) in which Frasier and Vecchio question a witness and Frasier later remarks he must be a former boxer, judging from the development of his wrists and damaged knuckles and a slight slurping speech impediment indicating a recovered fractured mandible and it was written on his t-shirt.