Stephen Boyd, on the practical value of a training in math, with lessons for building software. "In my opinion, the real value of math in applied settings, ... is it gives you clarity of thought. Here we are in Silicon Valley ... I could get one team, and say, 'go build this thing.' With a lot of high-level tools now, you can bang something together that looks like it's working ... But there's another style that's just beautiful. People who think about it very deeply, often trained in math or something abstract, they don't do anything for a day or two. [Then] they look up and go, 'The 87 things we've been asked to implement are actually all instances of only 3 different things. So we're going to implement [those 3 things] correctly.' When people just hack something together to knock off 87 requirements, it's going to be horrible code, badly structured, ... it won't be correct ... you definitely won't be able to extend it. Whereas when you see people who think abstractly, and took the time to work out the correct abstractions, you get beautiful lean code that has very high probability of being correct. As a purely practical matter, the cost of ownership of that project is a lot less because it will work, and it's extensible and maintainable. It's like Linux, for example. That's a good model for this."