
Sherlock Holmes averts world war using mathematics - zeratul
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2012/01/the-mathematics-behind-sherlock-holmes.html
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kghose
If you like math fun and movies I would recommend the series "Numbers" and the
movie "A beautiful mind" as a dramatic portrayal of paranoia that some famous
mathematicians have developed.

(The linked article is a bit light and in the end not so interesting for me,
unfortunately.)

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bitwize
_Numb3rs_ is, to me, a grown-up version of _Mathnet_ , the math-heavy police
procedural parody that accompanied each episode of _Square One TV_ (a
children's educational program oriented toward mathematics that aired on PBS
in the 80s and 90s).

The difference is, on _Mathnet_ there are extended scenes of the characters
actually doing math. That was the attractant for me...

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pork
Numb3rs, to me, is a parody of math. You can argue whether it's a disservice
to math or not when it's presented as a magical tool obfuscated by senseless
jargon and technical term soup, which is what I found Numb3rs to be (and I'm a
mathematician). It's sort of like the "zoom in on B3 and enhance" of math.

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yummyfajitas
It's also a bunch of unnecessary math. \

FBI guy: "Hey little brother, we found this remote control car door opener.
Can you and your hot grad student talk about math for a few minutes and then
tell me who owned the car?"

 _On tv:_

Brother: "Sure thing bro. Prime numbers and encryption 2 3 5 7 11 13..."

Grad student: "I'm a hot female role model talking about elliptic curves."

 _In real life:_

Brother: "Love to help, but I gotta finish this paper so I can get tenure. Why
don't you just call Toyota?"

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jiggy2011
I love clever touches like this in TV and films. When referencing for the
purposes of a storyline niche topics such as CS , Maths or Physics I always
feel that whilst writers need to make their story accessible to people who are
not savvy in these topics they should always stay as true as possible to the
field itself and not insult the intelligence of people who are familiar with
these things.

I get quite annoyed when people put "hacking" scenes into films that are
filled with nothing but nonsense. Usually legitimate technical jargon that is
thrown together in ways that don't make sense.

Does anybody have any opinions of the modern Sherlock remakes that have
appeared on the BBC recently?

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jshort
I find it most annoying when a computer is used in basically any TV show or
movie. The actors always look to just be tapping on the keys at random, often
hitting completely irrelevant keys to the task at hand. It doesn't ruin the
scene for me but it does not make it as good as it can be. The attention to
detail in this film made it more enjoyable.

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extension
Sadly, they overlooked the detail that most people in Victorian England
actually didn't know kung-fu.

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Umofomia
Holmes did know martial arts in the original stories:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartitsu>

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darylteo
Well... TIL.

Thank you.

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siegecraft
eh..I was hoping this was related to the BBC show Sherlock

