Charlie Eppes

Encyclopedia : C : CH : CHA : Charlie Eppes

Dr. Charles Edward Eppes

Charlie Eppes, played by David Krumholtz, is one of two main fictional characters in the television show NUMB3RS.

Charlie is a young mathematical genius and professor of applied mathematics at the fictional California Institute of Science, CalSci (primarily based on Caltech, where some filming and mathematics consulting is done). As a world-class mathematician, he helps his brother Don Eppes to solve many of his perplexing FBI cases, sometimes with close friends and colleagues Larry Fleinhardt and Amita Ramanujan, and has consulted for the NSA for nearly five years, having attained the highest level of national security clearance.

One of Charlie's mathematical models in CharlieVision.

Charlie has wild furrowed hair, is wary of people and frequently enthralled with objects and patterns. His father has said Charlie is easily fascinated, possesses a big heart and is thorough. But he misses certain things completely. Meanwhile, Larry observed that he is "a talented theoretician with an ego problem" and a student once described him as fast talking and disorganized, but Larry disagrees. He has a high standard of guilt. While contemplating, his antics and mannerisms may even disconcert more conventional thinkers. With his headset, Dr. Eppes has an intense focusing ability while he voraciously writes equations, often covering several chalkboards. Like his brother Don, he is stubborn and obsessive ("one part exuberance, two parts obsession"), especially when it comes to work, but he's rather naïve when it comes to human behavior. The latter often interferes with his FBI work and, thus, is the cause of much distress for him at times.

Amita working with Charlie.

Quite conversely, Charlie's research often interferes with his relationships: as with Amita on their first date, for all they could talk about is mathematics; Fleinhardt says that it is a common interest and they should not struggle to avoid the subject. Charlie has also spent some time with his ex-girlfriend, Susan Berry, an attractive neuroscientist from London. He had lived with Susan for two years, and Larry described this as his very own Berry's phase. However, she later reveals that she is currently involved with someone else and has to return to England. Charlie has attempted to start a relationship with Amita once more, though her job offer at Harvard University has strained this possibility and made him distraught.

The episode "Uncertainty Principle" is significant for the backstory it gives on the family relationships, particularly Charlie's difficulty in dealing with his mother's death from cancer. While it's unclear how Don reacted, Charlie spent the last three months of his mother's life isolated in the garage, incessantly working on one of the Millenium Problems, specifically P vs NP; it's a point of contention between the brothers. Also, Charlie doesn't think Don understood what he went through during their school years, especially how he was treated as "Don's brainiac little brother" by his peers in high school. However, Charlie's relationship with Don remains strong, as he has begun to increasingly fear for his brother's safety on the job and still looks to his older brother for acceptance.

In "Prime Suspect," Charlie purchases the beautiful Craftsman family home from his father, who continues to live with him. Now 30 years old, Charlie wants to be responsible and take care of his father but still believes that much of the pressures involving their dad has been put on his shoulders as Don doesn't seem to have enough time. Charlie also feels guilty about the amount of time his parents, particulary his mother, spent with him as a child; he even asks his mother in a dream if she regrets the time away from Don and Alan because of the special attention he needed growing up.

And I tend to remember numbers. — "Uncertainty Principle"

According to Charlie's father, he could multiply 4-digit numbers mentally at age 3 and at the age of 4 required special teachers. In the second grade, he attempted to find a 70-digit narcissistic number in base 12 — Charlie has described himself as "quixotic" in elementary school. A prodigy, Charlie attended Princeton University at the age of 13 after graduating from high school at the same time as his older brother, and published his first mathematical treatise at the age of 14. In fact, he was the youngest person to ever write a paper of importance.

His paper on the Eppes convergence, which concerned asymptotics of Hermitian random matrices, made him a star in his field. Following a seminar that heavily criticized this seminal piece, Charlie realized that his work with the FBI has prevented him from doing research significant to other mathematicians and now hopes to spend decades on cognitive emergence theory ("the mathematics of the brain") to rectify this certain inequity, which has delighted Larry. Although he was a child prodigy, Charlie moreover fears the fact that his best years in his research will never come ahead of schedule again.

He is extremely talented in chess, as it requires both his father and brother to play against him and a distraction to defeat him. Charlie also has vast understanding of theoretical physics, often assisting Larry with his multi-dimensional supergravity theory and papers on gravity waves, and biology, extending to knowledge of ciliate protozoa and the spread of infectious diseases. While brilliant in some areas, he is lacking in others. He is apparently a bad speller (e.g., he misspells "anomaly" and "conceited") and does not know the meaning of "defenestration" (for which Larry chastises him stating that the idealization is to be a Renaissance man and that even math and physics majors had to have a course on English).

Notes

Following his five-year studies on random matrices, Charlie worked on sequences with orthogonal symmetry and has given a seminar on the zeros of random orthogonal polynomials. Charlie has taught courses on chaos theory and fluid dynamics at CalSci in addition to giving guest lectures on applied probability.
Charlie corrected the loophole at the infinite-dimensional simplex in the Eppes convergence pointed out by rival prodigy and fellow Princeton graduate Dr. Marshall Penfield (Colin Hanks), calling it the Penfield variation.
Larry has compared Charlie to Évariste Galois, another once-plagued mathematical prodigy.
According to Charlie's high school yearbook, his favorite person is Galileo. (The picture of Charlie in his high school yearbook is actually a publicity still of David Krumholtz from his role in the movie "10 Things I Hate about You.)
Charlie likes to play Frisbee golf, video games and basketball. He also enjoys snowboarding and may be getting the hang of golfing and rock climbing. Fleinhardt has challenged him in air hockey, with his "physics" against Charlie's "geometry."
Charlie never liked his mother's pancakes, though Don did. He is partial to the garage like his mom and spreading his work out in a manner similar to his father with his blueprints.
Professor Eppes didn't have a driver's license in season 1, but got a second learner's permit. In the season 2 episode "Harvest," he shows a California driver's license. He is also a little wary about signing up to become an organ donor.

Charlie Eppes

Notes

See also