In This Math Thriller, Leo Woodall’s Numbers Add Up

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,” he added. “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.