I recently watched KPop Demon Hunters, where there is a honmoon made of patterns that only the three protagonists can see and manipulate. That got me thinking again about math, science, and magic, which In the case of the three popstar demon hunters, takes the form of radial sinusodial waves.

In this post, I’m going to try to convince you that math, science, and engineering is magic.

Let’s anchor ourselves first with math, which from a utility standpoint gives us the ability to process, model, and manipulate information from the world.

If you can collect information from the world in mathematical form (visual, auditory, textural, etc), then you can build things that can act upon the world in very precise ways.

Let’s say you have a scifi planet covered in lava sinks- your mission is to drop people onto a part of the world without dropping them into lava. A previous expedition has determined that the sinks roughly occur in can be modelled roughly as sin(x) + sin(y), where f(x,y) is the height from sea level.

Then if you know the location of a bottom-most point of one of the lava sinks, then you know exactly all the other places you can drop someone such that they have the highest chances of avoiding the lava (of course, surface curvature and other factors will come into play here).

trimmed_lava.mp4

Another example: Say you discovered a historical artifact, and want to upload a 3D scan of it to put into a historical digital archive. Inevitably, there will be a lot of rust or general tear and wear, as well as noise from the 3D ${scanner}^{[1]}$ Not to worry! You can use Laplacian smoothing to smooth out the irregulatories, and also control “how much” is smoothed out.

If math is a way to make sense of and manipulate information, then physical sciences (material science, chemistry, etc) and engineering is a way to be able to interface with and act upon the world.

Here’s some real life examples:

• Create a hearing aid device that filters out background noise in real time (e.g. Kalman filters from math, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog convertors from engineering side ).
• Create robots that can speak naturally with humans (e.g. AI):
  • Modeling language as a discrete distribution (i.e. with tokenization), and learning to predict and generate via sampling over these distributions, as well as predicting 3D meshes of facial expressions. Engineering is both the digital to audio input/outputs, as well as potentially holograms or VR/AR for 3D rendering.

Returning back to KPop demon hunters, you can model where the honmoon waves will be at any point in time, and then, with potentially some special gloves and some chemistry (depending on what material the honmoon is made of), probably be able to manipulate it to some extent within the laws of physics.

On another note, I feel like someone should figure out something to do in the frequency range of pink noise, given it’s so prevalent in this world.