Sherlock Holmes averts world war using mathematics | Hacker News Reader

Sherlock Holmes averts world war using mathematics

newscientist.com

69 pointszeratul24 comments

If you like math fun and movies I would recommend the series "Numbers" and the movie "A beautiful mind" as a dramatic portrayal of paranoia that some famous mathematicians have developed.

(The linked article is a bit light and in the end not so interesting for me, unfortunately.)

Numb3rs is, to me, a grown-up version of Mathnet, the math-heavy police procedural parody that accompanied each episode of Square One TV (a children's educational program oriented toward mathematics that aired on PBS in the 80s and 90s).

The difference is, on Mathnet there are extended scenes of the characters actually doing math. That was the attractant for me...

Numb3rs, to me, is a parody of math. You can argue whether it's a disservice to math or not when it's presented as a magical tool obfuscated by senseless jargon and technical term soup, which is what I found Numb3rs to be (and I'm a mathematician). It's sort of like the "zoom in on B3 and enhance" of math.

It's also a bunch of unnecessary math. \

FBI guy: "Hey little brother, we found this remote control car door opener. Can you and your hot grad student talk about math for a few minutes and then tell me who owned the car?"

On tv:

Brother: "Sure thing bro. Prime numbers and encryption 2 3 5 7 11 13..."

Grad student: "I'm a hot female role model talking about elliptic curves."

In real life:

Brother: "Love to help, but I gotta finish this paper so I can get tenure. Why don't you just call Toyota?"

I can only hope that some day Square One will air again. That show was crucial to me as a kid.

Numb3rs is, to me, a grown-up version of Mathnet,

Whereas Beautiful Mind is spectacularly accurate. I used to make a game with other grad students in the math department, identifying what was on the blackboards in the background. It was always real math.

Thanks for pointing me to that!

(https://www.google.com/search?tbm=vid&hl=en&source=h...)

I love clever touches like this in TV and films. When referencing for the purposes of a storyline niche topics such as CS , Maths or Physics I always feel that whilst writers need to make their story accessible to people who are not savvy in these topics they should always stay as true as possible to the field itself and not insult the intelligence of people who are familiar with these things.

I get quite annoyed when people put "hacking" scenes into films that are filled with nothing but nonsense. Usually legitimate technical jargon that is thrown together in ways that don't make sense.

Does anybody have any opinions of the modern Sherlock remakes that have appeared on the BBC recently?

I really liked the series "Sherlock" with Benedict Cumberbatch(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_%28TV_series%29).

For the older ones I thought the Jeremy Brett ones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_%281984_TV_seri...) were very good.

The most recent one with Benedict Cumberbatch (what a name) is great (the second series just started a week ago).

Check out http://thebigblogtheory.wordpress.com/ The technical adviser for the TV show The Big Bang Theory does a weekly blog post about the science and tech behind each episode.

I find it most annoying when a computer is used in basically any TV show or movie. The actors always look to just be tapping on the keys at random, often hitting completely irrelevant keys to the task at hand. It doesn't ruin the scene for me but it does not make it as good as it can be. The attention to detail in this film made it more enjoyable.

Sadly, they overlooked the detail that most people in Victorian England actually didn't know kung-fu.

Holmes did know martial arts in the original stories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartitsu

Well... TIL.

Thank you.

Extending this to the representation of current technology in TV and film, Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror[1] (particularly the first of the series) has, in my opinion, the most accurate depiction of it I've ever seen.

[1] http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_(TV_series)

Did you ever notice that in movies, people almost never use a mouse? That's always bothered me.

it's because they all use xmonad and emacs.

I think Trinity actually uses nmap in one of the Matrix movies...

And she uses a program called "sshnuke" which outputs "[a]ttempting to exploit SSHv1 CRC32." Although sshnuke doesn't exist, the CRC32 exploit is real.

> I love clever touches like this in TV and films.

Me too, "Contagion" movie hired Dr. W. Ian Lipkin who is a specialist in molecular methods for pathogen discovery: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/09/contagi...

I actually just finished watching the first two episodes of the second season. It is simply fantastic.

For anyone who hasn't seen it -- there's a great writeup on some of the tech portions in the new Tron movie here: http://jtnimoy.net/?q=178

eh..I was hoping this was related to the BBC show Sherlock

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