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This is a blog where a professor from Northeastern University's Math department posts mathematical comments on the television show "Numb3rs". To comment, write to bridger@neu.edu.
Unique visitors since 6/14/2005:
February 23, 2006
Larry and Charlie often exchange knowing references to Larry's work with "random Hermitian matrices" and they also somehow figure in the fictional "Epps Convergence." What is this all about?
This topic is extremely advanced and specialized. I don't work in the field, so I'll have to transmit what some of my colleagues in physics and chemistry have told me. In particular I'd like to thank Prof... continued »
February 17, 2006
Tonight's (repeat) episode contains the scene where adult professional mathematicians are portrayed as acting like junior high school students. Charlie makes a crude and out-of-character sexual reference to Amita and is swatted down with an equivalent jibe from rival Marshall Penfield. This is a real low in dialogue -- one that you might think was the product of the people who produce beer commercials. I was told that it was tested on some "focus group" whose members loved it... continued »
February 12, 2006
Heavy snow today: good day for writing a blog!
There have been several episodes where Charlie has enhanced camera images of various sorts. Last Friday's (repeat) has him producing a recognizable face from what seems just blackness... continued »
February 12, 2006
Last Friday's show was a repeat. The blog I just posted on Image Processing is new, but I wrote blogs on finding position from a sundial and spherical trigonometry last October 11 and 13; these can be found in the blog archives (on the left).
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February 8, 2006
Benford's Law, already described a few blogs ago, is related to a law in linguistics called "Zipf's Law". You can Google this if you are interested: it has to do with the relative frequencies of the most frequently appearing words -- in any language.
February 7, 2006
No one knows how long humans have been creating music, but the earliest attempts at understanding the theory seem have been made by that strange society called the Pythagoreans. Its founder, Pythagoras, lived on the Greek island of Ionia, sometime between 600 and 500 B.C.E. He is famous mostly for the statement of the Pythagorean Theorem --- a fact known to the Babyloneans for at least a millenium before him... continued »
February 5, 2006
To which kind of data does Benford's Law apply?
If you had some truly random, uniformly distributed numbers: say 10-place decimals between 0 and 1 (e.g. .3449285716), chosen by rolling some sort of 10-sided dice, you'd expect that each of the ten digits 0, 1, 2,..., 9 would appear 1/10 of the time --- and you'd be right. Benford doesn't work here... continued »
February 4, 2006
In an episode where mathematics is not used to solve any crime, there was nevertheless a lot of interesting math-related topics mentioned. My favorite is "Benford's Law."
Benford's Law says that for many kinds of numerical data, if you look at the first digit, it is more likely to be a 1 than a 2,more likely to be a 2 than and 3, etc... continued »
February 1, 2006
Although molecules of water don't in general have electric charges, each one behaves as if it had balancing positive and negative charges, separated by a tiny distance (this is called a dipole). Since opposite charges attract, this allows nearby water molecules to line up in such a way that they are attracted to each other. The net effect, then, is for molecules of water to experience a cohesive attraction toward each other... continued »