Keith

Davy Keith seemed to be possessed with a passion for perpetual motion. It was beyond Marilla's power to make him sit still.

We all have to study math in school at one time or another. And many of us have wondered: will this stuff be useful afterward, in real life? Mathematicians Keith Devlin and Gary Lorden answer an emphatic "yes". In their new book, The Numbers Behind "Numb3rs," they argue that math is especially useful in the science of crime-solving: the subject of the popular TV show, Numb3rs. The authors make the case that the stories on the show might be fictional, but the critical role of math is very real.

The premise of Numb3rs, a CBS-TV series that premiered in 2005, is simple: two brothers, one a seasoned cop, the other a genius mathematician, team up to solve crimes in modern-day Los Angeles. Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University, was immediately attracted to this idea, and not just because the hero is a mathematician.

“I think allowing this moniker, ‘Defund the police,’ to ever get out there, was not a good thing,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) told The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel on Thursday.