NUMB3RS

[quest ion]

I'd totally digg this if there were more math involved! Hehe.. anyone loved the series?

[yondyr]

We tried several episodes but gave up. Solutions to problems are contrived and very suspect in their application. Corny in the extreme.

[Monte314]

Well, I enjoy the show for the attempt it makes to integrate the mathematics (no pun intended) with intuitive decision making processes. I think this presentation renders a public service, because mathematics does play a critical role here. And, the stuff they put in the show is the real thing: they get the symbology right, correctly pronounce the terms, and the applications are generally valid. All in all, I think they do a good job.

Now, in the "real world", of course, things are not nearly as *nice* as on TV. Often the data are hard to get, of low reliability, incomplete, and don't fully cover the problem space.

Further, you aren't usually making a choice between a small number of well-characerized alternatives; rather, you are trying to find one *particular* needle in a huge and growing pile of needles.

But a TV show has to have closure, so you limit the complexity in a way that makes it possible to catch the bad guy in an hour. I'm not complaining. If they wrote the scripts for guys like us, the show would never have aired its first episode!

[Evil Eye]

I only watch one episode of numb3rs, but the characters felt kinda flat.

[ScottH]

I love the show.

For me, Mathematics was [just] fun and interesting until I learned calculus. At that point, a light turned on and I realized it [math] was the most powerful thing I knew.

So, I love the show because, although it stretches reality a little--as most stories do--, it shows how Mathematics can can solve problems that completely escape our intuition; how it can seem almost magic at times.

[searcheagle]

We tried several episodes but gave up. Solutions to problems are contrived and very suspect in their application. Corny in the extreme.

I agree with your assessment of the show that the solutions to problem fit too perfectly and are suspect in application. Also, the data is WAY TOO perfectly available.

HOWEVER, I have found myself sorta addicted to the show for a while in the past. Knowing it was sorta corny yet unable to pull myself away anyway.