Rockets, Religion & Rejection - with Destin Sandlin from Smarter Every Day

Just a quick number for our question again, though, Destin.

How important was the mathematics at university that underpinned the engineering? Was it pretty standard mathematics? Important, but standard.

You didn't need to solve the Riemann hypothesis.

But how important was math at this point? Oh,

it was everything, man.

So I got my undergrad at University of Alabama down in Tuscaloosa, master's degree at UAH, and I'm still in school at UAH for a PhD program.

What is that? That's Huntsville, is it?

Yes, it's University of Alabama in Huntsville.

It's where I get the master's and I'm working on the PhD.

And so at the undergrad level, the highest math you go to is, you know, you take linear algebra, but basically differential equations are, We'll get you there.

Like you're doing the heat equation.

You're doing things like that with partial differential equations and differential equations.

I remember I took DiffEQ in the summer.

I still remember all my teachers.

My teacher's name was Natakorn Sukantamala.

I remember him because he was very difficult to understand, but he was a good teacher.

And so I remember the moment that they taught us the Laplace transform.

And so like you do all this stuff and you're trying to figure out all this stuff and they're like, oh yeah.

And there's this thing called the Laplace transform.

You can switch between time and frequency.

And I was like, ah, that's awesome.

And so with undergrad, you can get there for the most part with just differential equations.

Now, when you get to the master's level, Things change a little bit.

You start learning about more complex things.

Yeah, it's recently I've had to take a very difficult math test.