ChapterZero

I finally saw a complete episode of Numb3rs last night– yes, I am way behind the times. In this episode, Charlie was helping the FBI track two escaped fugitives. The quality of the show surprised me: I was expecting a watered down show, one with all hints of adult content washed out for the kiddies, and the mathematical sophistication of at most a college freshman. There was not any of the gratuitous cursing that mars a lot of today’s reality dramas, and I did notice an emphasis on family dynamics that reminded of Judging Amy, but this episode was not overly saccharine: there was an aborted sex scene, when Charlie’s brother interrupted one of the convicts and his girlfriend mid-coitus. And although the main character repreated certain words way more than necessary–e.g., Bayesian, Markov chain–, the eventual application of math seemed to justify the mentioning of them.

The only two bitter notes left from the show are: 1) the fact that the FBI didn’t even consider that the vehicular collision that gave the convicts their opportunity was staged until Charlie mentioned it, and 2) the writers’ insistence on drawing out Charlie’s discovery that the accident had been rigged. I suspect the latter was done because Charlie only had to apply simple algebra and high school physics to make that discovery; to make it smell more mathematical, they had him talk about modeling the accident using a Markov chain. I’m not even sure what that entails: exactly what aspects of the accident could be modeled in a useful manner using Markov chains, and how would they be relevant to the investigation? The convicts were already loose, and we already knew the accident was staged. At least Charlie’s episodic fascination with Markov chains, and as he refers to it ’statistical probability’ (as opposed to the non-statistical kind, I suppose), paid off in the manner in which he tracked one of the fugitives down.

That was the core instance of applied math: from the FBI tipline reportings, collated information on recent crimes that he might be responsible for, and the location of family and friends, Charlie made a time series of possible locations of the fugitive. Then, he used some kind of Bayesian inferential techniques to denoise the data– mainly to counteract the uncertainty and corruption in the data coming from the tiplines– and come up with a pattern to the convicts’ movements. It would have been nice if he’d specified in more detail exactly what methods he used, but I suspect then the show would’ve turned into a math lecture. Like Simon Alexander, the newest postdoc in the wavelets group said in reference to explaining harmonic analysis to a Cal I class: “you can either say very little, or very much; there’s not much in between.”

As long as it illustrates one or more non-obvious application of advanced mathematics per episode, I’ll continue to think Numb3rs is worth watching.