Im not at all math savvy. In fact the opposite. I was having a conversation about math with a colleague and I realized that other than teaching i have no idea what someone with a math degree or a “Mathematician” actually does? Im curious now. Whats their day like? Who employs them?
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Mathematics and physics converge too. Optimization is a big part of optics design: everything from car headlights to the camera lens in your cell phone to the Hubble. Hubby just retired from the Optics group of Synopsis. Was a programmer on their CAD system. Used math for:
1. Ray tracing
2. The “glasses” that fixed the Hubble
3. The optical version of the scanning tunnelling microscope (how to get light out of a fiber optic cable thinner than the wavelength of light, as I understand it)
4. Detecting gravity waves
5. Periscope
6. All sorts of lenses (cell phones, flashlights, the light pipes that light up your car dashboard)
Over the years, he has regularly solved quadruple integrals (lots of calculus in optimization and Ray tracing), found math errors in PhD theses algorithms, and did a lot of code in quadruple precision.
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