
Just saw the first two episodes of Prime Target on Apple TV+ -- I'm surprised Prime Video didn't pick it up - a Da Vinci Code-like thriller, in which mathematics -- the quality of prime numbers -- is the stuff of deadly espionage, a source of the secrets of the world, more precisely the universe, that at very least lead to the murder of mathematicians who know too much about it.
Now, I won't pretend to understand much if any of the mathematical equations we see our protagonists scribbling on tablecloths. So I won't pretend to pass judgements on whether the equations have a scintilla of validity. I will say that I read some interesting essays on the philosophy of mathematics decades ago, and I discovered that there was a split among let's call them philosophers of mathematics, between those who thought mathematics were in effect a language that described fundamental realities in the universe, verses those who argued that the deepest mathematics were just a sort of mental gymnastics.
I always sided with the first group, but I don't know enough about math or physics to prove it or even tell you why. Also, since too much knowledge, at least in this series, might be fatal, I might not be telling you the truth right now, anyway, for obvious reasons.
But the first two episodes moved quickly, and made it easy to suspend my disbelief and accept that the CIA or MI6 or whatever it is that they call the KGB these days in Russia has agents out there, determined to make sure that genius mathematicians didn't act on their knowledge and therein control or at very least change the world we live in.
Hey, it's a welcome relief from what's really going on these days, and that's what's entertainment is supposed to do, right? So I'll certainly be watching the third episode of this thriller -- which should also be called science fiction -- next week, and will report back here with whatever I can make out of the narrative and the prime equations.
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