Numb3rs
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.
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May 27, 2006
Last night's show, "Toxin", was a repeat from last November. There were three blogs on that, dated November 26, 27 and 28 (mostly on Steiner points).
By the way, the sniper/tracker Edgerton was, perhaps, named after "Doc" Edgerton, the MIT scientist who pretty much invented the modern technique of high-speed photography using strobe lights. His pictures of a balloon being punctured by a bullet, and splashes of milk droplets are world-famous... continued »
May 27, 2006
As a mathematician, I am frequently asked by people who are interested in math if the "infinite" decimal .9999999..... (nines forever after the decimal point) is actually equal to 1.
The answer is yes, at least under most interpretations of what is meant by 0.999999... To make sense of this, let me review, briefly, what the different "kinds" of numbers are.
The simplest numbers are the whole or counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, ... etc... continued »
May 21, 2006
In Friday's episode, Don is forced to shoot his attacker in self defense. He shoots him at point-blank range while being stabbed with a syringe of morphine. Since he shoots from so close to his attacker, the actual paths or trajectories of his shots are probably not relevant to a pending FBI investigation... continued »
May 20, 2006
There was no actual mathematics used in last night's show, though there were some references to mathematical topics. This has been the pattern of late, which is unfortunate. However, we bloggers have to blog where we can, so here are some comments.
First of all, the writers have Charlie somewhat misinterpret the "Activation Synthesis" theory of dreams, so let me put this in perspective... continued »
May 13, 2006
At the beginning of last night's (May 12) episode, Charlie looks at the patterns of waves at the beach where the victim's washed up bodies are found, and seems to have an intuition about how the currents are behaving. I have no idea where Charlie's feeling for waves comes from, but there is a lot of very interesting mathematics related to waves in fluids... continued »
May 13, 2006
Winds are made up of countless moving molecules of air. Moving mass has kinetic energy. When the wind "hits" the ocean water, some of this kinetic energy is transferred to the water; energy is never lost, and so the water gains what the air loses. The water moves in the form of waves.
The tides, produced by the gravity of sun and moon, are movements of vast masses of water, hence also represent kinetic energy... continued »
May 7, 2006
There were lots of numbers in last Friday's show -- especially in the form of credit card numbers -- but not really much in the way of mathematics. So, I thought I'd write a bit about how "we use numbers everyday."
About 2500 years ago a shadowy figure named Pythagoras lead a sect --- the "Pythagoreans" --- who believed that everything is number. By this they meant that not only did everything in the universe have its own number (e.g... continued »
May 4, 2006
OK, here's the stuff I promised on 4-dimensional cubes, also called hypercubes or tesseracts (from the Greek meaning "four rays"):
tesseracts
