"When The Big Bang Theory first aired there weren’t many nerds on mainstream TV, at least besides the character with the glasses and braces in the background on a teen drama. Before TBBT, nerds were the characters the protagonists avoided, the ones with the crushes on the blonde cheerleader lead, or the person the popular ensemble helped out to show that they were nice."
Am I the only one who remembers Numb3rs? That show treated Charlie (one of the two leads, a math professor) with respect, at least in the episodes I saw. His supporting cast in the math and physics departments was excellent as well.
Hell, there's an episode where he actually teaches a class, on-screen, on the Monty Hall problem:
Real math nerds fondly recall -- and search for on YouTube -- old episodes of Mathnet, the cop show that made up the last 1/3 to 1/2 of PBS's Square One TV.
Yes, it's for kids, and the math that's there focuses on basic things like prime numbers and Fibonacci sequence. But it's brilliant, laced with humor, and you're likely to see more actual math being done in one 10-minute episode of Mathnet than in a season of Numb3rs.
Numb3rs was cool, for a while. But they exhausted their good ideas for "solving crimes with math" before the first half of season 1.
The time I gave up was when Charlie announced he could use math to figure out the time the crime took place based on long the block of ice had been melting, which he could calculate based on ambient pressure and temperature and surface area and lots of extra things they made up. Or they could just look it up in a book.
I agree, although having Season 1 on DVD, I'd say they managed to do a decent amount of math in almost every episode of it (even if it doesn't always solve the crime). Then my wife and I bought Season 2 and were quite disappointed.
That said, in the episodes I've seen, Charlie is almost always treated as an important contributor by the other characters. His work is glamorized and treated with respect by the writing and production staff. He's awkward, but treated like a human.
Am I the only one who remembers Numb3rs? That show treated Charlie (one of the two leads, a math professor) with respect, at least in the episodes I saw. His supporting cast in the math and physics departments was excellent as well.
Hell, there's an episode where he actually teaches a class, on-screen, on the Monty Hall problem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbCM8w18h-Q