Mathnet

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Mathnet is a segment on the children's television show Square One, of which five seasons were produced (1987-88, 1990-92). This parody of Dragnet featured detectives at the Los Angeles Police Department who solved mysteries using their mathematical skills. There were two main characters: detectives Kate Monday (Beverly Leech) and George Frankly (Joe Howard). Mary Watson also had a regular role as the duo's technical analyst, Debbie Williams. Later on in the series, Kate Monday was replaced by Pat Tuesday (Toni DiBuono) one season after the show's setting moved to New York City in the third season. James Earl Jones played a recurring role as the chief Thad Green. He also briefly appears in season 4 and indicates he knows Pat Tuesday. When the duo was transferred to New York, Captain Joe Greco (Emilio Del Pozo) became their leader and undercover NYPD officer Benny Pill (Bari K. Willerford) became their semi-regular backup support.

Each segment of the series aired on one episode of Square One, a production of the Children's Television Workshop aimed at teaching math skills to young viewers. Five segments made up an episode (one for each weekday), with suspense building at the end of each segment. A Mathnet comic briefly appeared in 3-2-1 Contact magazine, also a CTW production, but the magazine eventually stopped featuring Square One content.

Both Mathnet and Square One went off the air in 1994 (it ran as reruns until then after the final 1992 season was completed), reappearing from 1999–2003 on the cable television network Noggin, a joint venture of Nickelodeon and CTW.

[edit] Math and science

Real principles of math and science used by the detectives to solve crimes include:

• Kinematics ("The Problem of the Missing Baseball")
• Chromatic scale ("The Problem of the Passing Parade")
• Displacement of fluids ("The Problem of the Trojan Hamburger")
• Modular Fibonacci sequence – the Pisano period mod 5 ("The Case of the Willing Parrot")
• Statistical sampling ("The Case of the Deceptive Data," "The Calpurnian Kugel Caper," "The Case: Off the Record")
• Triangulation ("The Case of the Map with a Gap", "The Case of the Bermuda Triangle", "Despair in Monterey Bay")
• Random number generation ("The Calpurnian Kugel Caper")
• Databases ("The Case of the Pocono's Paradise")
• Handwriting analysis ("The Case of the Purloined Policies")
• Hamiltonian path ("The Case of the Smart Dummy")
• Process of elimination ("The Case of the Great Car Robbery")
• Number patterns ("The Case of the Missing Air")

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

[edit] External links

• SquareOneTV.org - Guide of episodes guest star appearances
  • Episode guide
• Mathnet - To Cogitate and to solve - Episode guide, photos, sound clips, and actor bios.

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