1 mystery, 2 detectives equal "Mathnet'
CRAIG WOLFF
It was morning in New York and the detectives were confounded. The baseball player, who looked suspiciously like the actor John Sayles, had taken a sudden leap from has-been to star at the...
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Tampa Bay Times
It was morning in New York and the detectives were confounded. The baseball player, who looked suspiciously like the actor John Sayles, had taken a sudden leap from has-been to star at the plate, and they had been around long enough to smell foul play. Logic told them that nobody has a .718 batting average. At least nobody human. Pat Tuesday is her name. George Frankly is his. They bounded for the door, some scribbled clues in hand and a few hypotheses in mind. One more thing: In their holsters, they were packing LC-22s _ calculators, that is.

Tuesday and Frankly solve mysteries. They don't leap into cars or use their fists. Mathematicians both, they pause a lot to look at each other and quietly ponder the problem at hand.

They are the featured characters on "Mathnet," a serialized segment of Square One TV, a public television show produced by Children's Television Workshop that tries to bring home the message that learning math need not be painful.

The episode in question, with the film maker John Sayles stepping up to bat, was taped on location in and around Manhattan recently and will be shown in the fall as part of the program's fourth season.

Pat Tuesday (played by Tony DiBuono), the brains of the operation, is intended as a role model for young girls who might think math is for boys.

Joe Howard plays her sidekick, who always seems to be half a decimal place behind. Tuesday is taking over from Kate Monday, who left the series last season.

The show has earned accolades (three Emmys and an Action for Children's TV Achievement Award) and also some criticism from traditionalists. But if the show's target audience _ 8- to 12-year-olds _ is learning without being thumped on their heads, then the producers and writers believe they are achieving their objective.

"More than teaching math, we are teaching about math," said Joel Schneider, the show's director of content. "We don't talk down to kids. We don't want to be too heavy and didactic. And through it all, we've taken pains to expose the breadth of mathematical situations, such as probability, graphics and data analysis."

For 15 minutes, mathematical concepts are dispensed through animation, a game show, videos and skits performed by a seven-member repertory company. A sketch involving surgery on .007 is a typical example: The numbers lie on an operating table, and the doctors, in full surgical gowns and with the seriousness of Hawkeye Pierce, delicately move the decimal point. "Now let's see what happens when we multiply by 10."

But Square One TV's centerpiece, occupying the other 15 minutes, is "Mathnet," in which Tuesday and Frankly find their clues buried somewhere in the numbers.

The humor comes chiefly from the brains of David D. Connell and Jim Thurman, the senior producers who are also the program's head writers and who never let their main characters go anywhere without their deadpan faces.

The world they have created owes as much to the comedians Bob and Ray, whose straight lines just hang out there, as it does to the 1950s police series Dragnet.

Surprisingly, the mix creates an atmosphere conducive to problem solving, an intricate blur of words and numbers. The audience has to stay in step with the punch lines as well as with the mathematical riddles.