NUMB3RS BY THE NUMBERS

Teachers usually counsel their charges to turn the TV off. But some have started TO doing precisely the opposite: Math teachers around the country are assigning students to watch a popular television show — a crime drama, no less — and gearing their lesson plans around it.  

Sound like an unusual concept? So is the premise of CBS’ sleeper hit, Numb3rs: Each week, a genius math professor (David Krumholtz) at the fictional Cal Sci (California Institute of Science) devises complex equations and theories to help his FBI brother Don (Rob Morrow) solve some of the Bureau’s most perplexing cases.

A show revolving around algorithms and equations may have seemed an unlikely eyeball magnet in a medium filled with sex-starved housewives and forensic scientists with corpses. Yet against the odds, Numb3rs — now in its sixth season—attracts more than 10 million viewers a week, making it one of Friday night’s top-rated programs. That’s because the show—which is partly filmed at Cal Sci’s real-life counterpart, Caltech — manages to make math interesting and sexy.

Not that Numb3rs’ creators, husband-and-wife team Cheryl Heuton and Nicolas Falacci of Pasadena, set out to use math as a gimmick to cash in on the craze for TV crime shows. The couple had long been fascinated with mathematicians and physicists like Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan and James Burke, and they wanted to create a drama that would showcase their perspective on the world.

“All those people who were trying to interpret science for the general public were big inspirations for the show,” says Heuton, who credits Bill Nye, TV’s “The Science Guy,” with sparking the idea of a mathematician as a central character. The science educator has since made a guest appearance on the show. “He was actually the guy who taught me—this was back in 1994—the need to build enthusiasm for math in the general public so that more people, more kids will feel excited about that as a career.”

Still, the veteran writing duo—who had been making a good living penning unproduced feature films for the studios—believed that if their number-crunching hero was ever to make it to the airwaves, he would need a commercially viable vehicle. “We realized that if we were going to do it in today’s TV marketplace, it would probably have to be a mathematician who solves crimes,” says Falacci. And the idea of mathematicians doing police work made perfect sense, they say. “They’re relentlessly logical,” says Heuton. “They think about things in such a direct logical way that they make even police detectives look emotional.”

The pilot episode, for example, was based on the work of KenRossmo, a Canadian mathematician and homicide detective who used geographic profiling to help Louisiana police track down a serial rapist. Using a sprinkler’s action as an analogy, the show’s central character, Charlie Eppes, reasoned that if one knew where several drops of water splashed, one could write an equation showing where the sprinkler was. Likewise, if one knew where a rapist had struck, one could eventually determine where he lived.

Heuton and Falacci originally planned to set the show at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They’d been told there were too many shows set in L.A. already on the air and, since Falacci hails from Boston, the couple were confident they could write about that locale with authenticity. But the Massachusetts school wasn’t interested. “We weren’t getting any cooperation from MIT,” says Heuton. “They said ‘We’re not in the filmmaking business.’”

Then there were the high cost and complicated logistics of working on the other coast. After filming a pilot in Boston, “we realized that this was going to be pretty harrowing,” Heuton says. “It’s expensive and it’s cold. And then the other decision was, you have one of the best institutes for math and science right under your nose in L.A., so why not just use that?”

Heuton and Falacci say they received a much warmer reception at Caltech. After being approved by then-President David Baltimore, the couple recruited Gary Lorden—then head of the math department—as a consultant. Lorden provides the mathematical background for stories and reads every script for accuracy. In 2007, he co-authored with Stanford professor Keith Devlin The Numbers Behind Numb3rs: Solving Crimes With Mathematics (Plume), which showcases mathematical techniques actually used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

The writers weren’t the only ones who needed math tutoring. Lorden and others at Caltech have been an invaluable resource for Krumholtz, whose character, Charlie Eppes, is loosely based on the late Caltech physicist Richard Feynman. “When I was a kid, I was terrible at math,” says Krumholtz. “It was an actual problem for me in school. I ended up squirreling my way out of taking calculus. I knew I was going to fail.”

The 31-year-old actor says the role was extremely challenging, especially since he had to deliver lengthy monologues about complex theories and equations. “In the beginning, I was terribly frightened—just the pressure of playing a genius was a terrific burden on me,” Krumholtz says. “But over time, I’ve come to embrace it.”

Although he credits Lorden with helping him better understand his character, Krumholtz also spent time observing mathematicians at work and “just soaking up as much of the Caltech vibe as I could.” He says he was determined to hone in on the minute details and mannerisms of real mathematicians. “Before shooting the pilot, I spent a lot of time skulking around the Caltech campus, peeking my head into math classes to see how mathematicians held their chalk and wrote on a chalkboard.”

Heuton and Falacci decided to put their Caltech portrayal to the test: How would students respond to a show based not only on their rarefied discipline, but on their elite institution? Before Numb3rs’ debut in 2005, the couple decided to find out by screening the pilot at the school’s Beckman Auditorium. “We were definitely sweating bullets,” recalls Falacci. He remembers that a few lines of dialogue drew unexpected laughter from the crowd, but by the end of the screening, the show had won them over. “We later found out that they were laughing because they couldn’t believe someone was making a show about them,” he says.

Later that year, CBS partnered with Texas Instruments and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to create the “We All Use Math Every Day” program, which provided teachers with classroom activities and lesson plans based on concepts presented in that week’s episode. More than 43,000 teachers signed up for weekly kits to instruct an estimated 4 million students on math concepts used in the show. In 2007, Heuton and Falacci went to the State Department in Washington, D.C., to accept a National Science Board Public Service Award for their contributions to scientific and mathematical literacy. “In many ways, that means more to us than having a successful TV show — to feel like you’ve contributed in a beneficial way to society,” Falacci says.

In the end, Numb3ers’ ability to challenge viewers may be its ace in the hole. Judd Hirsch, who plays Charlie’s father, Alan Eppes, believes that’s what draws so many viewers. “I don’t think anybody across America understands any of the math that we have here,” says Hirsch, who has a degree in physics from City College of New York. “It’s really beyond everybody. But that’s exactly why they like it. Because they don’t understand it, they say to themselves ‘This is really about something. This is really about how mathematics matters.’”