Sadly in my professional experience when there was an opportunity to use something really mathematically elegant or even write a data structure it was usually a symptom of overdesign and couldn't be justified in terms of value for the product. It's often better to have something simple, maintainable and performant rather than something that is pristine art but requires a skill to understand/maintain.
The exception to this is in terms of having a profound intuition about what is happening in your application that could be causing problems. I think a mathematical mind is useful there.
Another huge exception to this rule is if you're actually INVENTING something. If you have something that is fundamentally better than what's out there and you're inventing it and it's the central aspect of your product, then yeah.. spare no expense. Go the full math route if that will help you gain advantage.
So I'd say you don't want to complicate things with math if you're just doing standard development. You might want to leverage math to UNDERSTAND and to INVENT novel things if that is part of your business.
A mathematical mind is always good.. but if it's an area you're not good at there's still lots of room for you in the business.
Sadly in my professional experience when there was an opportunity to use something really mathematically elegant or even write a data structure it was usually a symptom of overdesign and couldn't be justified in terms of value for the product. It's often better to have something simple, maintainable and performant rather than something that is pristine art but requires a skill to understand/maintain.
The exception to this is in terms of having a profound intuition about what is happening in your application that could be causing problems. I think a mathematical mind is useful there.
Another huge exception to this rule is if you're actually INVENTING something. If you have something that is fundamentally better than what's out there and you're inventing it and it's the central aspect of your product, then yeah.. spare no expense. Go the full math route if that will help you gain advantage.
So I'd say you don't want to complicate things with math if you're just doing standard development. You might want to leverage math to UNDERSTAND and to INVENT novel things if that is part of your business.
A mathematical mind is always good.. but if it's an area you're not good at there's still lots of room for you in the business.
All very good points! Thanks for commenting, I hope readers see this because it very much enriches this post, gives really good insight.