Viewers of prime-time television are likely quite familiar with police chases, blood-stained bodies and massive explosions that rock objects of all shapes and sizes (including houses, cars and buildings). What they may be less familiar with is a protagonist whose job title is “math professor” and who uses crime investigation techniques that delve deeply into mathematical concepts and equations. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what they are likely to find on the CBS Paramount television crime drama NUMB3RS, which airs at 10pm US Eastern on Fridays---and which last week completed its third season on air. NUMB3RS has received widespread acclaim not only from television viewers (who have made it Friday night’s most popular show for three seasons running), but also from mathematicians and professional societies (who hail its positive portrayal of scientists and their use of science and in particular mathematics for the public good). Even before the show first premiered in January 2005, a group of researchers at Wolfram Research (a team that now includes colleagues Michael Trott, Ed Pegg, Amy Young and me) has been part of the core group of advisers who assist with all aspects of the mathematics in the show. Our role runs the gamut from suggesting new ideas to improving detailed mathematical content to preparing formulas, figures and animations. And, somewhat surprisingly to us, many of our comments and suggestions actually ultimately appear (in some form) on air! Screen capture from NUMB3RS, which debuted January 23, 2005, on CBS. NUMB3RS is © 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Note the Mathematica Spikey in the lower-left corner.

In 1992, while teaching at the Technical University of Ilmenau, I gave a three-semester course on the use of Mathematica. I am a theoretical physicist by training, so the graphics component was just one of the not-so-important parts of the system for me at the time. Calculating integrals and minimizing functions for many-parameter variational wave functions of semiconductor nanostructures in very high magnetic fields was much more on my mind. But the students asked me to cover graphics in depth too, so I did. The cover picture of the Mathematica 2 book had a hyperbolic dodecahedron on it (the Version 1 book has a graphic of the Riemann zeta function along the critical strip). The hyperbolic dodecahedron is quite symmetric and has the same symmetry group as a regular dodecahedron. It has a natural 120-fold symmetry (12 equivalent faces, each being a pentagon made from 10 equivalent pieces). Each one-tenth of a face just has a few polygons. By using the full symmetry group of the dodecahedron, constructing the tesselation used on the cover was relatively easy. Starting with a regular dodecahedron with appropriately subdivided faces, one just has to extend the vertices outwards (or press the face centers inwards) to obtain a hyperbolic dodecahedron. I showed the construction in the lecture (a nice mixture of geometry, matrix algebra, equation solving and graphics itself). Little did I know at that time that the force of the hyperbolic dodecahedron would be with me for the next 15 years.