I’ve hit pause so we can get a better look at the tablecloth. Ten mathematicians are leaning forward. One has gotten out of his chair to read what’s on the screen. Another is looking up Wilson’s theorem on his phone. After a few seconds he exclaims, “It’s true by definition!” Everyone bursts out laughing. I don’t get the joke.

I’m watching Prime Target, an Apple TV+ series, with a group of Dickson Instructors, postdocs in UChicago’s math department. I’m married to one of them. (Their names have been redacted because—if we learned anything from Prime Target—being a mathematician can be extremely dangerous.)

The show follows Ed Brooks, a graduate student in math at Cambridge who studies prime numbers. He sees primes everywhere, in the flight patterns of starlings, in shells, in flower petals—but he’s also looking into an ancient formula for prime numbers. Ed’s unconventional research attracts the attention of the National Security Agency (NSA)—which for some reason has been monitoring the research of 15 mathematicians in Europe—and a shady international organization. It turns out that Ed’s work could decode every digital key in the world, knowledge a lot of powerful people would like to control.

Ed begins scribbling a lengthy computation on his adviser’s tablecloth after his adviser’s wife, an art historian, shows him photographs of a recently discovered eighth-century library in Baghdad. The patterns on the library’s ceiling, Ed is convinced, hold the mathematical secret he’s been looking for. Ed’s fit of genius doesn’t result in a shocking new discovery, but rather, the Dicksons assure me, something a graduate student would learn in the first week of a number theory class.

Do mathematicians really scribble on tablecloths when inspiration strikes? I know that they tend to prefer a chalkboard and Hagoromo chalk, but it turns out that the occasional tablecloth is commandeered in service of mathematical progress. M., as I’ll call him, witnessed a similar happening at a restaurant near the Institut Henri Poincaré, a mathematics hub in Paris: “They had disposable tablecloths with a plain white background—I think the restaurant might have adopted this design specifically for the customers nearby,” he says.

We watch the first two episodes together, pausing and rewinding frequently to look at math scratched on a piece of paper, in a pocket notebook, on the tablecloth (Ed, of course, doesn’t work on computers, because they “aren’t fast enough”). The first episode was more interesting to our group than the second, which was more about the NSA agents following Ed (“I bet there’s a group of NSA employees somewhere watching this show right now,” T. mused.)

“It’s a little offensive,” said T. “It plays into every trope of the isolated mad genius, socially awkward.” Ed’s romantic relationship with a man did buck some stereotypes, though, and was a pleasant surprise. Another character tells Ed he “doesn’t look like maths,” but we all agreed his blazer and the pins he’s decorated it with made for a plausible graduate student look. “He doesn’t look like a rower,” though, N. said, referring to Ed’s hobby in the show. “His back is underdeveloped.”

While we heard again and again how great Ed was at math, the show didn’t seem all that interested in delving into the details. “He doesn’t even explain what a prime is!” A. pointed out. Ed lost us when he asserted that prime numbers might be “God’s cipher here on Earth, the DNA of existence.” “He did sound like a crank,” said S. We wondered what Ed’s fellow graduate students would think of him.

While the group didn’t take Ed too seriously, a mention in the first episode of mathematicians doing all their best work by age 29 got an anxious groan from the room. (Everyone had passed that mark, and their prime, apparently.)

There was also frustration with the whole concept of secret research in the show. The math community actually functions by sharing research broadly, with scholars traveling the world to give talks and collaborate with other experts, and publishing new results on the open site arXiv before they are peer reviewed and published in journals. “One of the great things about math is it’s generally all published freely, and people don’t hold things back,” said A. “Maybe you won’t tell people until you’re sure of it, but there are no secrets.”

Since there was some disappointment over Prime Target, I ask if other representations of math in film and TV pass muster. There were some votes for Hidden Figures; Silicon Valley was cited as a good representation of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) in general, with a special shoutout for the CEO’s Vibram FiveFingers shoes (“They really nailed it.”—T.); Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theory in Jurassic Park was a favorite; several had fond memories of growing up with Cyber Chase on PBS Kids. There weren’t many Good Will Hunting fans in the room: “He literally looks at a blackboard and solves this problem. Like, how do you even know the notation?” K. exclaimed.

Oppenheimer “was like Avengers, but for STEM.” I’m not sure if this was meant as a compliment.

There was some gushing over Abe in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. “His lin alg [linear algebra] class is actually accurate,” says K. “His rant about the linearly independent vectors. That’s my favorite one.”

But too many movies and shows about math try to be epic and action-packed, the Dicksons told me, full of ancient secrets and bursts of genius. “There was definitely some point when I thought that’s what mathematics was. Not too long ago even,” said W. But they all now understood their research to be about incremental progress:

• “Reading what other people have done.” 
• “Checking computations.” 
• “Doing small examples.” 
• “Trying to make some conjectures based on data, like a scientist would.” 
• “Sending emails to collaborators and asking them questions.” 
• “Yeah, we’ll email the experts.” 
• “Basically I’m thinking about something, and I’m like, OK, this is really shaky. Let me try to plug in some of these holes.”

The episodes of Prime Target we watched “show a spiritual quality that I don’t think exists for me in real life,” said S. “I don’t think I’m cracking the secrets of the universe. My life is very meat and potatoes most of the time.”

“A movie about math has to be mundane. Otherwise, it’s a lie,” someone pitched in. Even if the Dicksons rejected the attempt at epic spirituality, something about the vastness of their centuries-old field rang true. “A lot of people think math is just completely solved. Like, what else is there to add to it?” said T. “But it turns out there’s more unanswered questions than there are answers. It’s actually amazing when we can answer even one thing.”

Numbers are everywhere

In Prime Target Ed muses about a remarkable number, first to focus the attention of his former adviser, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, and then to test his new adviser’s wit. That number is 204, which when squared is the sum of three consecutive cubes. I wanted to know if these Dicksons had particular affinities for any numbers.

4: “My favorite number is four. Since I was like a kid. So it’s not because I do four-dimensional topology. It was because it was two plus two is equal to two times two. It’s also two to the two.”

37: “It’s a reasonably sized prime number that I could wear on a jersey.”

2025: “2025 is pretty good because it’s the only square year we get.”