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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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...)

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