The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS (31 page)

2.16.07
– “Contenders”

One of David's old school friends kills a sparring partner in the ring. It looks like an accident until it emerges that the same thing has happened before. When the coroner discovers that the dead fighter was poisoned, things look bad for David's friend, but a DNA analysis of some key evidence eventually clears him. Charlie says he can use a “modified Kruskal count” to analyze the sequence of fights the two dead fighters were involved in to determine the likely killer. A Kruskal count is a device for keeping track of playing cards used by stage magicians to “predict” the face value of a card that has apparently been lost in a sequence of shuffles. It is hard to see how this technique could be used in the way Charlie suggests. Perhaps his mind was distracted by the upcoming poker championship he is playing in, which provides a secondary theme for this episode.

2.23.07
– “One Hour”

While Don is occupied talking with the agency's psychiatrist, his team is in a race against time to find an eleven-year-old boy, the son of a wealthy local gangster who has been kidnapped for a $3 million ransom. Much of the action centers on the kidnapper directing agent Colby Granger to follow a complex path through Los Angeles to shake off any tails, a sequence taken from the Clint Eastwood movie
Dirty Harry
. Charlie and Amita assist by figuring out the logic behind the route the kidnapper has Colby follow, though it is never made clear quite how they manage this. It seems unlikely given the relatively small number of data points.

3.9.07
– “Democracy”

Several murders in the Los Angeles area seem to be tied to election fraud using electronic voting machines. Don, Charlie, and the team must find the killers before they strike again. Although the security of electronic voting systems involves lots of advanced mathematics, Charlie's principal contribution to solving this case is right at the start, when he computes the likelihood that a particular sequence of deaths could be accidental. When his answer turns out to be extremely low, that provides Don the key information that the deaths were all murders.

3.30.07
– “Pandora's Box”

A small executive jet crashes in the forest, witnessed by a forest ranger. When the ranger goes to investigate, he is shot, raising the suspicion of sabotage. The black box recorder is recovered and analyzed (by Charlie in a CalSci lab) and shows that the plane's altitude readings were off by several thousand feet. By analyzing the debris field, Charlie is able to locate the aircraft's flight control computer. When he analyzes the code, he discovers that the entire crash was caused as a ruse to insert computer code into the FAA's main flight control computer when the black box was read. Charlie's other main contribution to solving the case is the use of image enhancement techniques to deblur some key smudged fingerprints.

4.6.07
– “Burn Rate”

A series of letter bombs protesting biotechnology research has the same features of an earlier series for which someone is already serving a prison sentence. Charlie's initial contribution is to analyze the debris from the explosions to determine the construction of the bomb. Then he looks at the pattern of addresses from which the bombs were mailed to narrow down the main suspect's likely location. But when he realizes the data is simply too good—there are no outliers—he realizes that Don's suspect cannot be the bomber. But who is?

4.27.07
– “The Art of Reckoning”

A former mob hit man on death row has a change of heart and agrees to confess to his crimes in exchange for seeing his daughter before he is executed. Charlie advises Don how to conduct the negotiation by explaining the tit-for-tat strategy for repeated plays of the Prisoner's Dilemma, a two-person competitive game. The use of an fMRI scanner to determine if the condemned man is lying depends on a lot of sophisticated mathematics, but it's all buried in the technology, so Charlie does not have to do it.

5.4.07
– “Under Pressure”

Information recovered from a laptop obtained in Yemen indicates that a team of terrorists intends to pump nerve gas into the Los Angeles water supply. Charlie uses network analysis to try to figure out who the key operatives might be. Most of Charlie's contribution has occurred before the episode starts.

5.11.07
– “Money for Nothing”

A truck carrying medicines and fifty million dollars in cash destined for an African relief program is hijacked by a gang of sophisticated thieves. The FBI's efforts to locate the shipment are complicated by the activities of bounty hunters. Charlie performs a mathematical analysis of the truck's possible escape paths.

5.18.07
– “The Janus List”

A former cryptologist for British intelligence agencies confronts the FBI and sets off fiery explosions on a bridge as part of a desperate scheme to expose double agents who have poisoned him. To help the FBI follow the cryptologist's complicated trail of clues and make the critical contacts needed to obtain the list of double agents, Charlie must decipher messages that have been encoded using a variety of techniques, including a straddling checkerboard and a musical cipher.

ACE-V (fingerprint identification)

Adleman, Leonard

African embassy bombings (1998)

After-change (post-attack) scenarios

Airline passenger screening systems

Al Qaeda

Al Quso, Fahad

Al-Shehhi, Marwan

al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab

Albert, Reka

Alhazmi, Nawaf

Alleles

“All's Fair” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Almihdhar, Khalid

Anderson, Steven

Anthrax

Application of Bayesian Networks to Antiterrorism Risk Management for

Military Planners, An
(Hudson, Ware, Mahoney, and Laskey)

Arson

Artificial intelligence (AI)

“The Art of Reckoning” (
NUM B3RS
CBS TV series)

“Assassin” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Atkins, Derek

Atta, Mohammed

Attas, Walid Ba'

Automated reasoning programs

Average run length (ARL)

Axelrod, Robert

 

“Backscatter” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Banks, David L.

Barabasi, Albert

Bass, John

Batson, James

Batson v. Kentucky
(1986)

Battle, Jeffrey

Bayes, Thomas

Bayesian methods

Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One
(Thorp)

Beat the Market
(Thorp)

Beautiful Mind
,
A
(movie)

Bell Telephone

Beltway Sniper case, Washington, D.C.

Ben Khemais, Essid Sami

Bertillon system

“Better or Worse” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Bias

gender

racial

Big-S statistics

Bin al-Shibh, Ramzi

bin Laden, Osama

Binomial distribution

Biometric passports

BioSense system

Bioterrorism

early detection of

Blackjack

“Blackout” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Bogus official (distraction) burglary

“Bones of Contention” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Boston Police Department

“Boy who cried wolf” phenomenon

Brantingham, Patricia

Brantingham, Paul

Breeding, John

Bringing Down the House
(Mezrich)

British West Midlands Police

Brooks, Juanita

“Brutus” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

“Burn Rate” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

BusinessWeek,

 

Caesar cypher

“Calculated Risk” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Caldwell, William

California Highway Patrol

Canter, David

Cao, Zheng

CAPPS (computer assisted passenger prescreening system)

Card counting

“Carnival Booth: An Algorithm for Defeating the Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System” (Chakrabarti and Strauss)

Casinos

Castaneda v. Partida
(1977)

CATCH (Computer Aided Tracking and Characterization of Homicides)

Centers for Communications Research (CRC)

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Centrality measures

Chakrabarti, Samidh

Changepoint detection

Child pornography

Chromosomes

Cigarette smoking

Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP)

Cobb, George

Codes

CODIS (COmbined DNA Index System) system

Cognitech, Inc.

Cold hit search

Collins, Janet Louise

Collins, Malcolm Ricardo

Color-coded public alerts

“Combining Game Theory and Risk Analysis in Counterterrorism: A Smallpox Example” (Banks and Anderson)

Container shipments, nuclear screening of

“Contenders” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

“Convergence” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Corporate espionage

“Counterfeit Reality” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Cowans, Stephan

Credit card fraud

Crimestat computer program

Criminal geographic targeting (CGT) (
see
Geographic profiling)

CSMs (continuous shuffling machines)

Customer purchasing patterns

Cybercrime

 

Dahbur, Kamal

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, U.S. embassy bombing in

“Dark Matter”
(NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Data Encryption Standard (DES)

Data mining

geometric clustering

link analysis

machine learning

neural networks (
see
Neural networks)

software agents

text mining

Data Mining and Predictive Analysis
(McCue)

Database match probability (DMP)

Daubechies, Ingrid

Defense, U.S. Department of

“Democracy” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Denny, Reginald Oliver

Devlin, Keith

Diffie, Whitfield

Digital signatures

“Dirty Bomb” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Discovery Channel

DNA Advisory Board (DAB)

DNA Identification Act

DNA profiling

DNA Technology in Forensic Science
(NRC I)

Dolinger, Dennis

Double-blind trial

“Double Down” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Double-helix structure

Dragnet computer program

Dresher, Melvin

Drug smuggling

 

Echelon network

ECRI (Environmental Criminology Research, Inc.)

Encryption

“End of Watch” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Erdös, Paul

ESSENCE (Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics)

“Ethics and Law in the Electronic Frontier” (Chakrabarti and Strauss)

Euler-Lagrange PDE minimization

Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence, The
(NRC II)

Exemplar fingerprints

 

Facial recognition systems

Falacci, Nick

FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)

Fermat, Pierre de

Financial fraud

FINCEN

“Finders Keepers” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Finger Prints
(Galton)

Fingerprints

Finkelstein, Michael O.

First Monday
(online journal)

Flood, Merrill

Flynn, Stephen E.

Fourier, Joseph

Fourier analysis

Francesco, Al

 

Gallien, McCullan “Mac,”

Galton, Sir Francis

Galton points

Game theory

Gardner, Martin

Gehlbach, Stephen

Gender bias

Geodesic paths

Geographic profiling

Geometric clustering

Gilbert, Kristen

Godwin, Grover M.

Graff, Michael

Graph components

Graph theory

Grossman, Jerrold

Guare, John

“Guns and Roses” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

 

Hanjour, Hani

“Hardball” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Harrisburg Seven

“Harvest” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Hashing

Hellman, Martin

Heuton, Cheryl

Hidden parameters

Hirsch, Judd

Holliday, George

Homeland Security, U.S. Department of

Hong Kong Container Terminal Operators Association

“Hot Shot” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Howland, Sylvia Ann

Hudson, Linwood D.

Human genome

Hunting Serial Predators
(Godwin)

Hypothesis testing

 

“Identity Crisis” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Identity theft

Image enhancement and reconstruction

Immergut, Karin

“In Plain Sight” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Internet security

“Interpretation of Interaction in Contingency Tables, The” (Simpson)

Inverse square law

Investigative Data Mining for Security and Criminal Detection
(Mena)

 

James, Bill

“The Janus List” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Jenkins, Raymond Anthony

Joint Vulnerability Assessment Tool (JVAT)

JPEG-2000 digital image encoding standard

“Judgment Call” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Julius Caesar

Jury profiling

Jury selection, use of mathematics in

Jury Selection and Service Act of

Justice, U.S. Department of

 

Kaliski, Burt

Kelly gambling system

Ken Uston on Blackjack
(Uston)

Kennedy, John F., assassination of

Kevin Bacon game

Khobar Towers bombing (1996), Saudi Arabia

“Killer Chat” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

King, Rodney Glenn

Kissinger, Henry

Kohonen, Tevo

Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM)

Koon, Stacey

Krebs, Valdis E.

 

Lafayette, Louisiana

Laskey, Kathryn Blackmond

Latent fingerprints

Levin, Bruce

Levine, Ned

Leyland, Paul

Lights over Phoenix
(Discovery Channel)

Lindh, John Walker

Link analysis

Little-s statistics

Liu, Yifan

“Longshot” (
NUMB3RS
CBS TV series)

Lorden, Gary

Los Angeles Police Department

Los Angeles riots