Various Careers That Use Geometry

Video Transcript

"Design uses geometry, so just about any career that involves design, is going to have a lot of geometry, very important to it. Now, that computers and software are used in design, that means even more careers will be needing the knowledge of geometry. Both the actual designer of an individual application, and the computer software designer who needs to build a program that can handle lots of jobs. Here's a few. If you want to be an aeronautical engineer, you're going to need a lot of geometry to design wings, fuselage, all the parts of an airplane. If you want to be an automotive engineer, then you're going to need a lot of geometry in order to maximize efficiency, by reducing drag, increasing the amount of friction that the drive wheels feel against the road. All of these things can be done after you have a geometrical model of the vehicle. If you're interested in fashion design, there of course, is an artistic side to that, which won't need the geometry as much, but once you want to make the designs realize, you'll need a pattern designer, who can use the actual geometry to come up with patterns, to make the clothing. In fact, you might notice that a sleeve of a shirt for instance, is basically a cylinder, but to attach it at an angle, you'll have to cut that cylinder. Here's a piece that I cut off of this cylinder. If you stretch it out, you're getting a sign curve. Of course, one of the best careers for someone who knows a lot of geometry, is to be a mathematician. Either to invent the new mathematics of the future, by being a research mathematician, or to explain that mathematics to some students like yourself, perhaps, so here's my pre-calculus book. Ecology, finance, even designing search engines for the internet. All are going to involve networks, individual points connected by lines. Whether those lines are links on the internet, or supply demand relationships in finance, or food chain relationships in ecology, and if you give those connections weightings, depending on how important they are, and then talk about the distance from a single point to another, in terms of those weightings. Pretty soon you have a metric, and that's a generalization of what we need to study in geometry, and here's a few more. The first two that have a lot to do with intersecting lines and curves, in missile defense or in any other sort of military defense application. You might want shoot down a projectile, but in air traffic control, you want to make sure that none of those curves, ever cross, because that would mean a collision. The biologist is interested in geometry more and more, as we look at protein folding, and the structure of DNA, is that it's found inside of the cell. It can be curled and twisted and knotted and tangled, all geometrical concepts. A nuclear engineer is going to need to use geometry when it designs the fuel rods, or the control rods, in a reactor."