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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:
November 28, 2005
Some people (myself included) have wondered exactly how Charlie and his mathematics were helpful in last Friday's show. Here are the items that Charlie comments on.
(1) Information Theory. Charlie suggests that there was a common thread to the poisonings; this thread turns out to be the pharmaceutical company... continued »
November 27, 2005
Here is a proof that the Steiner point in a triangle makes an angle of 120 degrees with each side of the triangle (at least in triangles none of whose angles exceed 1200):
Once we know that the Steiner points must make 1200 angles with the sides of a triangle, we can actually find the Steiner point of a triangle... continued »
November 26, 2005
There's a lot to talk about concerning last Friday's show, but I think I'll start with Steiner points. There are more general definitions of these points, but in keeping with the spirit of the show, I'll just say that, given a bunch of points (places), a Steiner point is another point constructed in such a way that the sum of its distances to the given points is the smallest possible... continued »
November 24, 2005
The calculator company Texas Instruments (TI), in collaboration with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), has set up a website that contains all sorts of interesting information and activities related to the mathematics of each episode of Numb3rs. If you like math and would like to try some hands-on exercises, I highly recommend this site... continued »
November 19, 2005
In last night's show, Charlie plays a key role in capturing the bad guy by detecting hidden data. He does this in two ways: first by finding a hidden, pornographic, picture inside another innocent-appearing one, and again by detecting a hidden "partition" inside a computer hard-drive. Today's blog will deal with the pictures. I'll talk about computer drives later in the week.
A file containing a digital photo contains two parts... continued »
November 13, 2005
The phrase "data mining" doesn't refer to anything specific, but rather to a collection of techniques that enables one to go through a very large collection of data stored on a computer to find patterns. This is very different from simply going through the data and asking for examples of a particular correlation or statistical relationship (e.g... continued »
November 12, 2005
There was a lot of stuff to comment about in last night's show, so I'll just do a bit today and more later in the week.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is one of the great spin-offs of military-type technology, and uses a lot of electronics, physics and mathematics. Here's a rough description of how it works.
Above the earth is a network of what are called "geosynchronous" satellites... continued »
November 5, 2005
One theme of last evening's show was "propagation": the spreading of something into a new region. Mathematicians and physicists have been studying this for several centuries. The show began with the spread of a poisonous gas (first used in WWI) in a subway car. This is a form of propagation called diffusion. This can be analyzed on an atomic level by writing mathematical equations describing how small particles (atoms) "bounce" or interact randomly with each other... continued »
November 3, 2005
For more about radar and polar coordinates, Click here.
More stuff after tomorrow night's show.
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