A charming, highly intelligent, and intensely annoying TV series available on Netflix if you get it. A discrepant but not dysfunctional family consisting of a ferocious FBI agent, his genuine math prodigy brother, and a widowered dad who was once a sixties radical with a checkered past. It’s cops and robbers, but the prodigy, Charlie, is the secret weapon who uses the most exotic math possible to find the bad guys. He’s a much honored professor at a fictionalized stand-in for CalTech. But he likes the move from abstraction to saving people’s lives with the FBI. They explain and beautifully CGI the math involved.
And they all have issues. Also, a complementary math prodigy is Charlie’s long long love interest. They try to date, go out to dinner, and discover what they have in common is only math. Lo and behold, eventually, it’s enough. The annoyance factor is dad, Judd Hirsch, who is still, deep down, a sixties radical, even though Number One son is hardcore FBI and Number Two Son, for whom he’s sacrificed everything, is also increasingly FBI.
And there’s a beautifully witty performance by Peter McNichol as a way out there physicist who is struggling with quantum reality and the meaning of life. At times he lives in a Buddhist monastery, the steam tunnels under the university, and the garage of the brothers. And he has a delightfully unlikely love affair with an FBI analyst played by Diane Farr.
Pretty sure you’d all love it. And the Chinese food and pizza. In boxes.
And for more about math…
Ask Helkenberg. He knows what I’m talking about.
The Great Ka’s. “Through the blue where bloom the stars and the mother moon looks down, We’ll away to land of…”
You see, in my fictional world, music is also numbers…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uSR5A–rSOs
…and cosmology…
…and the journey to to the origins of the universe.
Which is right here.
Images, numbers, words, and divinity.
Behold the Raptor.
The real mathematics of the universe. Shammadamma.