By Katherine Lu

 I interviewed Joseph Lu, a Chief Scientist for Honeywell, who has a PHD in Chemical Engineering.  As a Chief Scientist, he is mostly involved in innovation. He sells ideas on how businesses should run themselves to most efficiently create the most amount of products in order to yield the most amount of profit.  In the most recent years, he’s worked to invent systems to save energy and money when transporting water in city pipelines and when manufacturing crude oil.

 In terms of schooling, Joseph started in mechanical engineering and then switched into chemical engineering.  These majors require a lot of higher level math such as linear algebra, multi-variable calculus, differential equations.

 Joseph considers math to be the building blocks of chemistry and physics. Together, they help us understand much about the world around us.  Math helps us impose order onto the natural world. With the help of chemistry and physics, math explains phenomenon like lightning and hurricanes.

 In the early twentieth century, strange happenings that no one understood periodically struck flour mills. There were explosive fires occurring every few decades even though it seemed that everything within the building was completely benign in nature.

 As it turns out, dusts have a very large surface area compared to their mass. Since burning can only occur at the surface of a solid or liquid, where it can react with oxygen, this causes dusts to be much more flammable than bulk materials.