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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 25, 2007
First, a few words about last night's show. The idea of using fractals to analyze art forgeries has already appeared on Numb3rs; see the blog Fractals and forgeries.
Fractal analysis has been used to analyze and classify curves -- especially graphs -- and surfaces for some time now. The textures of certain materials -- e.g... continued »
November 21, 2007
Two weeks ago, in the "Primacy" episode, the following dialogue takes place:
Larry: I have received a rather tantalizing offer, to join the DZero team searching for the Higgs boson.
Charlie: Well all right, the God particle, which would be a continuation of your spiritual seeking as well as your quest for a unified theory.
Larry: Faith in science is still faith, is it not..
Amita: Well that's very cool Larry... continued »
November 19, 2007
Did you catch my error in the last blog on "Taboo searches"?
In the diagram I show a "false optimum", and "intermediate optimum" and a "true optimum." However, if you look at the color-coding of the peaks (color based on altitude), you'll see that what I called the intermediate peak was actually the highest one. It looks lower than the one in the background because the whole surface has been tilted up... continued »
November 17, 2007
The main mathematical idea in last night's show was the taboo (or tabu) search. To see what this is about, suppose we have a landscape and we want to find the highest or "optimal" point. Unfortunately, it is very foggy, so we can't see much except points that are very close to us. We do have a GPS device, so we know where we are, including our altitude.
Suppose we start midway up the face of some peak... continued »
November 17, 2007
Although not relevent to the plot, last night's episode features Larry playing with a homemade version of "Hero's Fountain." This is very easy to make from some tubing and plastic soda bottles. Physics teachers R. Kezerashvili and A... continued »
November 16, 2007
Sorry to be so late on this, but it's been a busy week. Last week's episode ("Primacy") was quite exciting, and the Charlie-Amita romance is moving along nicely. The math we encountered was either tangential (some name-dropping) or stuff we've seen before in one guise or another.
The central application was the use of "combinatorial matrix theory" to find patterns in the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) playing.
As you probably know, a matrix is simply a rectangular array of data... continued »
November 3, 2007
As I've mentioned before, I'm not a believer in the ability of mathematics to analyze in any non-trivial way the behavior of individual human beings. Thus, a lot of Charlie's work on Don's CART (Classification and Regression Tree) seems overblown to me. In fact, Charlie never really makes it clear what the facts are, how they are organized, and how he proceeds given the absence of key bits of information... continued »