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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:
May 18, 2008
Near the end of the blog for May 4th I said: "Let's hope Charlie can avoid the temptations to work for the wrong people -- he has already had run-ins with the secretive NSA (National Security Agency) for whom he occasionally consults." I guess this past Friday's episode shows that Charlie will draw the line on what he will put up with from the F.B.I... continued »
May 10, 2008
One of the most important theoretical ideas in "modern" mathematics is the notion of a basis for a large -- usually infinite -- collection S of objects. The idea is to find a small, hopefully finite subcollection b1, b2, b3, ..., bn in such a way that each object in the full collection B can be written in terms of the smaller collection of the b's... continued »
May 4, 2008
There are some interesting things to talk about in last Friday's show, though most of them didn't figure in the actual plot. By far the neatest thing was Larry's and Charlie's demonstration of walking on a "non-Newtonian fluid." In case you missed this, you can see a YouTube version here.
First of all, though the physics and behavior of non-Newtonian fluids are weird, the fluids themselves are not necessarily exotic... continued »