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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:
March 28, 2006
I asked in yesterday's blog why there was a 65th team and an extra "play-in" game at the NCAA tournament. Thanks to DH, who provides the answer and history below.
"In response to your question about the play-in game. It was instituted in 2001 when the Western Athletic Conference split. Certain conferences get automatic bids for their conference winner to make it into the tournament and the WAC was one of these conferences... continued »
March 27, 2006
Since this is the second week that Numb3rs has been pre-empted by "March Madness", the annual NCAA college basketball tournament, it seems fitting to spend a bit of blogspace on some of the math related to this competition.
The basic arithmetic is this. 64 (technically 65: see below) teams are invited to participate, based on their records and strengths; more on this later... continued »
March 24, 2006
Because of March Madness (NCAA basketball tournament) there won't be a Numb3rs show again tonight. If you have any special requests for mathematics blogging, send me an e-mail and I'll see what I can do. I'm using this blog downtime to work on the math text I'm writing, but I'd be up for some interesting math if you have a suggestion.
Your blogmeister
March 14, 2006
Many real-world phenomena which take place over time are not "deterministic." This means that even if we know exactly what has happened up to the present, we can't tell exactly what will happen next. There are two main reasons for this: complexity and intrinsic indeterminability. The first reason is the easiest to understand: there are so many factors involved that we can't effectively make an exact calculation... continued »
March 12, 2006
"ESP" stands for Extra Sensory Perception: perceiving or knowing things without using the 5 standard senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing and taste. For example, some "psychics" (possessors of ESP) claim that they can sense an image, directly in their brain, of some actual occurrence or scene which is so far separated from them as to make direct sensory contact impossible... continued »
March 1, 2006
This is not a mathematics blog.
In this week's show, "Protest", there are many references to events that took place more than 30 years ago. I'd like to fill in a little background about them.
For those of us who lived through the "Vietnam Era", the current "war" in Iraq is like a nightmare relived, except that the causes and effects of the Vietnam war can now be seen with the clarity of established fact... continued »
March 1, 2006
In this week's episode "Protest" (to be shown on this Friday), Charlie examines the relationships among various members of groups organized in California during the '60s and '70s to protest the war in Vietnam. He uses yet another field of data organization made possible by powerful computers: Social Network Theory or SNT
In SNT individuals are represented by "nodes" or dots, and relationships between individuals are represented by lines joining their dots... continued »