FFT BY HAND LFG! I work in process engineering in semiconductors and the most math I actually use on the regular is statistics, but that's largely done by software and I just have to know what it's doing in the background. I don't do a lot by hand either. Hardest math exam questions in school was this advanced stats class back in the day where the final was "here are 20 theorems, please prove any 10." The physical chem question that was particle on a sphere was also pretty hard to do with a pencil.
Nice run--it seemed a bit sketchy at the beginning! I'm a software engineer in the financial sector and have had to do math in order to figure out and then program many of the statistics that we calculate. Though, I generally model in Excel and then work on programming it. Hand calculating has been useful a few times to figure out how to reduce certain aspects of the calculations into something easier/more efficient to program.
Always fun trying to talk about work online without doxxing yourself, especially when your job is so interesting. My work is very similar and I have had the same experience, although occasionally you need to dig up the textbooks in the rare cases that the core calculations aren't already written in Matlab.
I'm not terribly secretive about who I am admittedly, but I do have to be really careful about how much I can actually legally say about my job sometimes.
NASA actually published a paper on it, and it's actually a pretty darned physically-accurate trajectory. It's almost optimal, too! ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20150019662.pdf
@@bagel5085 That books gets a lot of hate (mostly on Reddit, I guess, and they pretty much seem to hate everything), but I absolutely loved it. I don't care if the science wasn't super realistic--it was still fun.