| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 |
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:
April 29, 2006
Last night's episode ("Rampage") had two interesting mathematical references: to random motion and tesseracts (4-dimensional cubes). I'll put off the tesseract for another blog.
For an introduction to Brownian motion, see "Random motion and Fokker-Planck": the blog for March 14... continued »
April 24, 2006
Blog reader M. Heddy recently wrote, concerning the "Guns and Roses" episode of 4/21:
I was hoping you could explain the scene in which David fired the gun while Charlie and Larry were in the other room. It looked very much like David was on the bed, firing up toward the ceiling, though that couldn't have been the direction that the gun was originally fired... continued »
April 23, 2006
Blog reader EB writes with this information -- for those of you who want hide your illicit data:
"Actually, there is a commercial product providing hidden partitions. Here's how it works. When you first install this software it takes a snapshot of allocation tables of your drive(s) and then encrypts those. Then you choose two passwords: the real one, and an emergency one... continued »
April 22, 2006
In last night's episode, Charlie, Larry and David create a "soundprint" of the gunshot that killed agent Nikki Amstead. What does this mean and how is it used?
When a gun is fired, the violent explosion of the charge creates an extreme compression of the surrounding air, forcing it away. The air acts like a spring, alternately compressing and decompressing. This "wave" of decompression/compression travels outward, and is what we usually call sound... continued »
April 21, 2006
In last week's episode, Charlie and Larry discover a "hidden partition" on the bad guy's hard drive. Several readers wanted to know more about partitions, hidden or otherwise. Since this is a rather specialized branch of computer science, and not strictly mathematical, I'll just pass on my understanding of how hard drives are organized.
First, you have to make a distinction between the physical hard drive and the logical drives that are created on it... continued »
April 8, 2006
The main mathematical element in the April 7 show was the tracing of student positions via "RFID" chips embedded in their student ID cards. So, let's take a look at how this works.
First of all, there is the chip itself: Radio Frequency IDentification. There are two kinds: active and passive. The active system puts a tiny radio, battery and antenna in each chip. This is sometimes called a "transponder", for transmitter + responder... continued »
April 4, 2006
In last Friday's (March 31) episode, Charlie tries to find who, among many candidates, may have murdered the Iraqi women's rights advocate. He examines the statistical records of many possible suspects and tries to find the ones most likely to have committed the crime. To do this, Charlie has to weigh all the factors that might indicate a willingness to murder... continued »
April 1, 2006
There were lots of references to mathematically related subjects in last night's show, but the one of most importance to solving the murder of Saida Kafaji was Larry's analysis of the shoeprints, showing that the American soldier Joe Karnes was being framed.
Two main threads concerning shoes and boots surfaced: one was a reference to the Czech shoe expert Petr Hlavacek (pronounced la-VA-check)... continued »