What is continuity calculus?

Question

My boyfriend is doubling majoring in continuity calculus and electrical engineering. He works for the government as an intern programmer for GPS. I guess he writes codes to program the GPS systems, and he said something about math measuring the distance from the earth to the satellite. Could you guys explain what continuity calculus is in simple terms and tell me how GPS has to do with this kind of math. :) Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, I can't define continuity calculus, but what calculus has to to with GPS is fairly simple.   Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) work because they contain very accurate clocks and produce very accurately timed radio signals.  When a receiver on earth gets the signal from several GPS, it can compute how far it is from each one and figure out where it is on earth.  This includes NSEW but also up and down.  

  It's like you were laying on the floor of a room and could measure the exact distance to each of the four corners to thus find where you are on the floor, except that the GPS are all moving in space so the math is messier.

  It actually gets more complicated than that because of signal variations and amounts of the atmosphere the signal has to travel through to reach the receiver.