Cheryl Heuton has figured out how to make math sexy. Her new TV drama, Numb3rs, is adding up big for CBS, pulling in some 12 million viewers most Friday nights. The series, which Heuton created with husband Nick Falacci, stars David Krumholtz as Charlie, a left-brained professor who helps his FBI agent brother (played by Rob Morrow) solve cases. The story lines are inspired by real-life problems, so a team of Caltech number crunchers routinely checks for accuracy. Factor in the sound, graphics, and editing acumen of exec producers Ridley and Tony Scott, and Numb3rs sounds like a winning formula. It might even get renewed in April, which happens to be Mathematics Awareness Month.
WIRED: Plane-crash survivors and sex-starved housewives, sure. But crime-fighting mathletes?
HEUTON: I'd been reading for years about scientists and mathematicians. The way they think - I find it intriguing and amusing and enlightening. Doing another crime show was actually not our goal. But we felt that if we were going to do something as unusual as a show about a mathematician, we'd better couch it in terms that were familiar to a TV audience. And that's how it became a crime show.
Pop quiz: What's the square root of 91125? Seriously, are you any good at math?
No. I have an affinity for geometry, and that's about it. If you gave me a difficult algebra problem, I probably couldn't do it. But the logic of math, the thinking, the philosophy of it, has always fascinated me.
CSI and all its spinoffs have made forensic science cool. Can Numb3rs do the same for math?
That's been a goal from early on. One of the inspirations for this show was Bill Nye the Science Guy. He talks a lot about inspiring young people to study math and science. I used to be a journalist; I did a three-hour interview with him once and I never forgot that. I wanted to influence people to think more about math as an everyday language that they can use.
How important is the accuracy of the math on the show - and who makes sure it's right?
It's very important to us. Gary Lorden, who is the chair of the math department at Caltech, is consulting for us. And we have a staff researcher who works with Gary and other mathematicians. Just yesterday I had a memo from Gary about a script that's about to go into production, you know, correcting any little error, couching things in more sophisticated terms, adding little details that a mathematician really would add to a discussion, things like that.
Your hardcore fans must be checking your work.
They're all doing screen captures. And with mathematicians watching, they're going to catch anything. We almost had a couple errors slip in, and David Krumholtz has caught two that got by me and Gary, in lists of prime numbers. One time the number was 33, and another time, embarrassingly enough, it was 9.
Why base the show on Caltech and not MIT?
When we initially wrote the pilot, we were going to use MIT. The main reason it switched to Caltech was cost. You don't have to fly back and catch your exteriors and all in another city. And also, just to be quite frank, MIT was not cooperative, and Caltech embraced the show.
The first few episodes were based on real-world problems. Will you ever run out of ways to apply math to crime?
They asked me that at Caltech: "Are you ever going to run out of ideas?" My answer was "Do you think you're ever going to run out of problems?" Mathematicians have already started calling in new ideas, some of which are just wild - and great. I remember when CSI first got on, reading a review that said, "The pilot is interesting, but beyond fingerprints and blood spatter, what is this show going to do?"
- Rebecca Smith Hurd
Numb3rs genius Cheryl Heuton
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