Not only that, but that bit of Q3 code was at one point in time a mystery to even John Carmack. Which is why it has the "what the fuck?" comment next to the ma

Not only that, but that bit of Q3 code was at one point in time a mystery to even John Carmack. Which is why it has the "what the fuck?" comment next to the magic number. Eventually they did track down the guy that authored that bit of code. Not only did the guy that wrote that have a good understanding of the math behind it, but he also understood the low-level mechanics of floating point. Which is something your average math major wouldn't know much about. Even most software engineers don't know floating point, sad as that may be. But Doom and early Quake are bad examples of why math is needed. Those were ground-breaking games. Their math has been encapsulated and turned into libraries and things like DirectX and OpenGL. Today, you generally just take a physics engine and 3d engine off the shelf and tweak it a little here and there.