Our story #4 revolves around the crime drama series ‘Numbers’. Numbers (stylized as NUMB3RS) follows FBI Special Agent Don Eppes and his brother Charlie Eppes, a college mathematics professor and prodigy, who helps Don solve crimes for the FBI.
The show #Numb3rs begins with:
“We all use math every day;
to predict weather, to tell time, to handle money.
Math is more than formulas or equations;
it's logic, it's rationality,
it's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know.”
The series covers a host of math concepts over its 118 episodes. Let’s look at one of them briefly.
#Example1: 4th episode of the 4th season- ‘#Thirteen’.
Don and his team seem to be one step behind a killer who leaves numerological patterns in Bible verses at the scenes of his crimes.
In this episode, the killer is choosing his victims based on a system of beliefs rooted in numerology. Charlie is forced to learn about these beliefs, and determine what mathematical patterns the killer is using in order to predict the next victim.
#Trivia:
The title refers to the various beliefs surrounding the 'baker's dozen', up to and including triskaidekaphobia.
This appears at the beginning of the episode: "6 days of creation, 10 commandments, 14 stations of the cross, 1 Word of God" (Crazy, right?!)
A bit more into the episode:
When Professor Trowbridge is explaining various ways of looking at numbers, and portrays these as being too strange to be a coincidence, and implies that this is evidence for some higher meaning in the numbers.
Charlie replies by citing the "strong law of small numbers", which says that there are not enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.
This means that small numbers will often appear in more than one place, and so such things are much more likely to be coincidences than we would initially think.
Charlie says that "one will always find meaning where one seeks it".
#Math involved:
What is “strong law of small numbers”? (This is just one concept among the many used in the episode)
In mathematics, the "strong law of small numbers" is the humorous law that proclaims, in the words of #Richard .K. Guy (1988):
There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.
In other words, any given small number appears in far more contexts than may seem reasonable, leading to many apparently surprising coincidences in mathematics, simply because small numbers appear so often and yet are so few.
Richard gives numerous simple, interesting and elegant examples for the same. (Don’t miss out reading a few examples in the document attached.)
The creators of the show use a variety of math concepts from Fibonacci sequence to complex statistical models, which makes the show highly entertaining for math enthusiasts.
Sources:
<1> Numb3rs TV series.
<2> Cornell Department of Mathematics- Numb3rs Math Activities.
<3> The Strong Law of Small Numbers by Richard .K. Guy- The American Mathematical Monthly.
#mathematics #numbers #story4
The show #Numb3rs begins with:
“We all use math every day;
to predict weather, to tell time, to handle money.
Math is more than formulas or equations;
it's logic, it's rationality,
it's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know.”
The series covers a host of math concepts over its 118 episodes. Let’s look at one of them briefly.
#Example1: 4th episode of the 4th season- ‘#Thirteen’.
Don and his team seem to be one step behind a killer who leaves numerological patterns in Bible verses at the scenes of his crimes.
In this episode, the killer is choosing his victims based on a system of beliefs rooted in numerology. Charlie is forced to learn about these beliefs, and determine what mathematical patterns the killer is using in order to predict the next victim.
#Trivia:
The title refers to the various beliefs surrounding the 'baker's dozen', up to and including triskaidekaphobia.
This appears at the beginning of the episode: "6 days of creation, 10 commandments, 14 stations of the cross, 1 Word of God" (Crazy, right?!)
A bit more into the episode:
When Professor Trowbridge is explaining various ways of looking at numbers, and portrays these as being too strange to be a coincidence, and implies that this is evidence for some higher meaning in the numbers.
Charlie replies by citing the "strong law of small numbers", which says that there are not enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.
This means that small numbers will often appear in more than one place, and so such things are much more likely to be coincidences than we would initially think.
Charlie says that "one will always find meaning where one seeks it".
#Math involved:
What is “strong law of small numbers”? (This is just one concept among the many used in the episode)
In mathematics, the "strong law of small numbers" is the humorous law that proclaims, in the words of #Richard .K. Guy (1988):
There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them.
In other words, any given small number appears in far more contexts than may seem reasonable, leading to many apparently surprising coincidences in mathematics, simply because small numbers appear so often and yet are so few.
Richard gives numerous simple, interesting and elegant examples for the same. (Don’t miss out reading a few examples in the document attached.)
The creators of the show use a variety of math concepts from Fibonacci sequence to complex statistical models, which makes the show highly entertaining for math enthusiasts.
Sources:
<1> Numb3rs TV series.
<2> Cornell Department of Mathematics- Numb3rs Math Activities.
<3> The Strong Law of Small Numbers by Richard .K. Guy- The American Mathematical Monthly.
#mathematics #numbers #story4