THE MATH behind NUMB3RS
Original Math Notes
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NUMB3RS Episode
Original Math Notes
Episode 413: Black Swan
Interactive Computations
Use the free Wolfram Mathematica Player to interact with the math behind NUMB3RS.
Scene 17:

                   COLBY

          Gives us eleven points, including the

          meth lab.  I see a map with a bunch of

          dots on it -- I figure you can tell

          me something -- maybe even find his

          stash house --

Basic Statistics of Movable Points

Basic Statistics of Movable Points
See how various location measures (such as arithmetic mean, median, root-mean-square, geometric mean, and harmonic mean) change as you move points around.
Scene 17:

                   CHARLIE

          We know the order that the locations

          were arrived at -- what about doing a

          time series analysis of overlapping

          Dirichlet Tessellations?



Larry considers this for a beat -- then --



                   LARRY

          Wow.

Voronoi Diagrams

Voronoi Diagrams
The Voronoi diagram (also called Dirichlet tessellation) for a set of points S in the plane is a partition of the plane into convex polygons, each of which consists of all the points in the plane closer to one particular point of S than to any other.
Scene 41:

Colby sits at a computer, running through a SERIES OF MUG

SHOTS as Don enters...



                   DON

          Any luck?



                   COLBY

          Facial recognition software, my brain

          is not.  But I've been through Intel's

          whole dossier on The New American

          Front, and I'm pretty sure he isn't in

          there.  Hooper giving us anything yet?

Emotion Tiling

Emotion Tiling
Facial expressions of happiness, fear, anger, and suffering can be reduced to the shapes of eyes and mouths. As suggested by Adolphs, Tranel and Damasio, and Patrik Vuilleumier, the perceived emotions in facial expressions involve processing by the amygdala.
Scene 50:

Charlie, Amita, and Larry a swirl of activity, as, on

THE MAP --



Almost an inversion of what we've previously seen; the

spiderwebbed cracks are faded, and the highlighted zones

are where no streets had been touched --



                   CHARLIE

          How're we doing with the cluster

          radius changes?



                   AMITA

          Almost entered --

Cluster Analysis for 2D Points

Cluster Analysis for 2D Points
Cluster analysis groups data elements according to a similarity function. In this case, the similarity function is simply the Euclidean distance function, which allows us to group them into clusters automatically based on how close they are.
 
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