Leo Woodall is the first to admit that he doesn’t know a lot about math. In the new mini-series “Prime Target,” streaming on Apple TV+, the 28-year-old British actor stars as Edward Brooks, a graduate student in mathematics at Cambridge whose visionary work places him in the cross hairs of a shadowy government agency. When he isn’t on the run, Brooks spends much of his time jotting down arcane equations and scrawling algebra on chalkboards — “not a single lick of which did I understand,” Woodall admitted with a laugh.
I had some maths lessons, but it was unsuccessful, so I just decided to memorize it all and write it as quickly as I could. It was a deeply stressful process.
“Prime Target” is a math thriller in the vein of “A Beautiful Mind,” Ron Howard’s Oscar best picture winner about the mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. and his work in Cold War-era cryptography. Brooks’s work is purely hypothetical and concerns patterns in prime numbers, but as he goes deeper, he finds himself within reach of a key that can unlock every digital password in the world.
Right now, math nerds are probably the most dangerous people on the planet, Taylah, a National Security Agency agent played by Quintessa Swindell, explains to a colleague.
The series creator Steve Thompson should know. A playwright and screenwriter best known for his work on “Doctor Who” and “Sherlock” for the BBC, Thompson is a self-described math nerd who taught mathematics at a London high school in the 1980s and ’90s. “Prime Target,” he said, was a longtime passion project that he had been thinking about since those days.
In 1999, the writer Simon Singh gave a lecture at Thompson’s school on “The Code Book,” his study of the history of cryptography. Thompson was fascinated. He had explained that in modern cryptography, everything is based on prime numbers, and that if anybody ever solved it, we’d all be in terrible trouble.
At the back of the classroom, listening to him talk, was where the idea started to percolate.
Nearly 20 years later, in 2017, the producer Ed Rubin asked Thompson what topic he would most like to write about if given a blank slate. I want to write a thriller with a mathematical angle, Thompson recalled saying.
Rubin was intrigued, and they began to develop what eventually became “Prime Target.”
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