EdTech Talk: Numb3rs Blog

December 2006

On October 18th, Math professor Mark Bridger discussed educational applications for blogging, based on his experiences writing a blog for the CBS hit series Numb3rs. The television drama, which chronicles the experiences of an FBI agent and his mathematically-gifted brother who helps him solve complex crimes in Los Angeles, seems to have rekindled an interest in math among its viewers --- both young and old. After hearing about the show, Professor Bridger decided to write a blog that would explain the math referred to --- often quite superficially --- in each episode. In part this was an effort to publicize "math at Northeastern" and thus increase the number of math majors. Indeed, in the ensuing months, the number of math majors at Northeastern (and at Cal Tech, the university on which the show’s fictional "Cal Sci" is based) have increased, and the blog has received more than 70,000visits.

Blogs have enormous potential as an educational tool. Bridger saw blogging as a way to use a pop culture medium to explain difficult math concepts. For example, in response to a recent episode when math whiz Charlie is contemplating wave patterns on the beach where victims’ bodies had washed up, Bridger provides an informative introduction to the ideas of fluid dynamics. Other blog topics have included tesseracts (4-dimensional cubes), exponential functions, and the mathematics of keyless car-door openers.

EdTech Center programmer Sue Aman set up the blog using custom-built blog software on a Northeastern University-hosted server. Key advantages to using internal resources instead of blog software from the Internet include being able to customize consistently the design and functionality of the blog and to maintain the Northeastern and NU Math Department header and logos. The blog entries are easy for Bridger to add and update from a Web-based administration tool, and easy for the blog visitors to search by date or title. The blog also includes an RSS feed for users who choose to aggregate the content.

Visit Professor Bridger’s blog or see a Vodcast of Professor Bridger’s EdTech Talk, visit www.atsweb.neu.edu/math/cp/blog/.