The Mathematical Hacker (2012)

The reason, I think, is that “hacker literature” tends to be dominated by Lisp programmers, and Lisp programmers tend to be ignorant of applied mathematics. It is tempting to declare that most programming problems “don’t need math”, but this is only true in the same sense that manufacturing, or supply-chain management, or baseball, “doesn’t need math”: advanced mathematics seems completely unnecessary to existing practitioners, but only until someone figures out that a particular mathematical concept is the right way to think about the problem at hand. The second reason I am optimistic about the place of mathematics in computer programming is related: the average consumer has more data than ever before, and mathematics can help to make sense of it, or at least make it more beautiful.

Source: www.evanmiller.org