Tony DeRose, Pixar’s senior scientist, gave a lecture on “Math in the Movies” at New York’s Museum of Mathematics. His job consists of translating principles of arithmetic, geometry and algebra into computer software that can render objects or power physics engines. He gave the talk in part to explain why aspiring animators and game designers need to have a solid base in mathematics.

DeRose has far more than just a basic understanding of math. He earned a PhD in computer science, focusing on computational physics and spent a decade as a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.

“This is the first instance of the Math Encounters lecture series at MoMath’s new campus in midtown Manhattan, but DeRose given a version of this talk many times before, continually updating it as Pixar’s technology improves and fans want to hear about the latest films,” writes The Verge.

“DeRose’s most important contribution to computer animation has come from new ways of quickly generating smooth curves with high fidelity,” notes the article. That practice is now commonplace in every Pixar film. While DeRose and his team continue to come up with advancements in technique, “the studio doesn’t have the same lead in R&D and proprietary software it once had.” That’s in large part to open-source software like Blender, which allows users to do everything Pixar software can do, said DeRose.

“We had a competitive advantage for ten years, but now we get more value by letting everyone contribute,” he said.

At Pixar, he thinks about the following types of things in mathematical terms: “Simulating water is easy,” he said. “What’s hard is, how do you make water more directable?” He explained that while making “Brave,” the main character Merida’s “voluminous, bright red, highly animated curls required building an entirely new physics engine. The studio’s animators had to figure out how to make Merida’s hair beautiful, expressive, and even more living than lifelike. DeRose and his team of scientists had to engineer a model that makes that animation computationally possible,” writes the article.

“Computer animation, DeRose says, frequently deals with modeling objects at greater scale and detail than even physicists typically deal with in their computations,” explains The Verge. Thus, most of his work revolves around finding better algorithms to create that type of scale efficiently.