Recently I started watching the show numb3rs again. Briefly it is a story about a genius mathematician that uses his quantitative skills to solve crimes being investigated by the FBI.
When this show first came out, I was very excited to have a math show so popular. Finally everyday people would get a chance to peer into the many applications of complex mathematics. Even to this day, I appreciate the effort at least. However, I must say after watching a few episodes of season three, I almost had to cringe at the ridiculousness of it all.
It has become quite clear that whoever the producer is does not really care about making the math make any kind of sense at all. Sure they consults with mathematicians, that do give him real math equations, but the applications are very unrealistic at times.
At typical storyline will go something like this:
FBI: We have two suspects somewhere in Miami that have a bomb, how can we find them?
Math Guy: We can use Quantum Theory along with fractal geometry to create a high probability density as to where they might be. Give me 1 minute....here is a list of five locations with the highest probability of their location.
FBI: Great, we found them at location 4...your awesome!
What's wrong with this picture? I guess the show is hoping that once the Math Guy starts speaking in "math" that they will assume he is doing some math tricks they don't understand but can actually give you this sort of information. But common, math is not magic...sure you can apply it to these types of problem but this problem is too general to yield any meaningful results.
As a math person that watches the show, I don't expect to understand the math or even all it's applications. But I would like to believe that what they are doing on the show is actually plausible; I would like to also believe that this math 'could' be done. I have come to the conclusion that I must not be their target audience.
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