When I went to college there was a kid at the dorms who had grown up in a small quiet Florida oceanfront resort, with very few people under the age of 65.
He was a mathematical genius and had been fascinated by the ocean since being a toddler, and started surfing as a pre-teen.
He had been working on equations like this his whole life, and had really accelerated with the recent arrival of electronic calculators in the early 1970's.