We were building a nuclear power station. One part of a nuclear plant is the reactor building (sometimes called “the containment”). In many “western” sites, the containment structure is that big round building (we used to call it the “BRT”. Big Round Thing). Here’s a photo:
Anyway, the containment building is made of reinforced concrete and had to be poured in a “continuous pour”. The site actually built a concrete plant to supply the concrete. When the time came to start the pour, no one knew how much concrete it would actually take. The concrete engineer thought it would take some number of concrete trucks (I want to remember it was 5000 to 5500), however this was more than 4 decades ago.
The engineer was, however, smart enough to ask a person on his crew about this. Gary happened to have a master’s in math. Gary looked at the prints and came up with a shape profile of the containment wall. There is a process in calculus to “rotate” an odd shape to determine the volume using two integrals. Gary figured out it would take more than twice the number of trucks the engineer had “guessed”.