It All Adds Up for CBS Series NUMB3RS

When actor David Krumholtz was in school, math was the bane of his existence. “I was the kid at the back of the class, screaming, ‘We’ll never use this in real life!’” he said with a laugh.



Krumholtz, as it turned out, is a better actor than soothsayer. For the past three seasons he has starred as mathematician Charlie Eppes on the CBS procedural drama NUMB3RS, who is recruited by his older brother Don (Rob Morrow), a Los Angeles FBI agent, to help solve crimes.

Krumholtz made his confession before a packed, enthusiastic house when the Television Academy presented “An Evening with NUMB3RS,” September 24 at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre.



Castmates joining Krumholtz and Morrow on the panel were their television father Judd Hirsch, FBI colleagues Diane Farr, Dylan Bruno and Alimi Ballard and Navi Rawat (a former grad student in math), along with executive producer–co-creators Nick Falacci and Cheryl Heuton and executive producers Ken Sanzel and David Zucker.



Kevin Frazier, weekend anchor and correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, moderated.

The evening began with a bang: a preview of the action-filled fourth season opener directed by executive producer Tony Scott, picking up on last season’s cliffhanger about whether agent Colby Granger (Bruno) is a traitor. (He isn’t.)



“We started with the math,” explained Sanzel, who conceived and wrote the episode. “[A concept called] the trust metric: what the various characters felt about Colby. Then Tony Scott came in, and there were lots of car crashes and helicopters!”



Film veteran Scott’s kinetic energy and three-cameras-running techniques don’t usually infuse the show—the math, of course, does.

“Math does everything,” Heuton noted. “It told the people who built this [theater] that it would stay up. We have a team of mathematicians we rely on. We research the crime, build up the math and ask them if we’re doing it right.”



Added Sanzel, a former New York police officer: “Sometimes it gets challenging to write a new investigation scene. Having math is an interesting way to get into the scene.”



Those math monologues, delivered by Krumholtz, could be “eighty-four lines long,” an admiring Farr noted; Krumholtz said his castmates still applaud him when he gets it right.

But, Ballard said, the writers don’t present the equations as, “’Pull out the gun. Here comes the math.’ They play it in such a way that it moves the story forward. Hopefully, you experience the math the way [the characters] do.”

The Eppes family relationship is as crucial to the show as its calculations, but CBS at first resisted the idea, wanting only a procedural. “In testing, the audience loved the relationships. Testing actually helped the show,” Zucker said. With the series’ Friday-night popularity, “We have the freedom now, we’re starting to explore these characters.”



The series has drawn a positive response from the academic community. And, said Krumholtz, “I meet kids all the time who are really into math because of this show. I’m the Pied Piper of math!”



The evening was presented by the Television Academy’s activities committee, chaired by Barbara Wellner. Robert O’Donnell is the Academy’s director of activities.

Wolfram Makes NUMB3RS Add Up

When the CBS research department sought to make the numbers add up correctly on NUMB3RS, they called on Wolfram Research.

Wolfram staff members Michael Trott, Eric Weisstein, Ed Pegg Jr, and Amy Young work as technical consultants on the series.



The team formulates the high-order, real-world, often cutting-edge mathematics that are are used to solve crimes on the show, such as the:

• set covering deployment problem (to optimize positioning of police units) and the
  
  
  
  
• illumination problem (to determine where a fugitive has fled)

"We review the scripts to make sure the math used is what a real mathematician would use," Eric Weisstein explains.

Learn more about Wolfram here at

The Math Behind the NUMB3RS.

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