Throng

Sunday, January 25th at 9:30pm

Numb3rs, returning on Sunday, January 25th at 9:30pm on 3, sees David Krumholtz portray Charlie Eppes, a mathematician at a fictional university called Cal Sci.

But even though Charlie is a Cal Sci professor, thus far the storylines have not allowed him to be seen teaching, and that's one aspect of the series both Krumholtz and the producers would like to address.

"The network is worried that going into the classroom might be boring and over people's heads,” Krumholtz explains to the US TV Guide. "We're just trying to figure out a fancy way to do a classroom scene that would apply itself to the crime."

"I would like to see him teaching as part of a story and something comes to him in the course of teaching," Numb3rs creator Cheryl Heuton adds.

While Numb3rs hasn't made it into the fictional classroom yet, it is having an impact on real ones. Texas Instruments, working with Numb3rs creators and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, has created an educational outreach program with activities and problems based on particular episodes.

"Isn't this great?" Krumholtz says. "The last figure we got, there were upwards of 20,000 teachers who had ordered these programs, and it's being used and seen by 2 million kids across this country, from grades six through 12."

With the Texas Instruments program, teachers can also address a common complaint about maths - which is students having trouble figuring out how it applies to the real world.

"What's so great about this show is not only do we put the maths in context, but we're able to visualise it for the audience [through special effects]. We do these visual metaphors that are really quite powerful, and they're really well done. They make the maths make just that much more sense,” Krumholtz says.

But will the numbers add up when a series of secrets and blackmail involving a young, up and coming actor are exposed when the team investigate the murder of a young woman in his Hollywood Hills mansion? Find out when Numb3rs returns on Sunday, January 25th at 9:30pm on 3.