I disagree. A mathematical result doesn't have to have direct application to the real world for it to be useful. Drawing analogies between the real world and ma

I disagree. A mathematical result doesn't have to have direct application to the real world for it to be useful. Drawing analogies between the real world and mathematical concepts is very powerful. I have a good example: Number theorists (amongst others) are seemingly obsessed with bounding things. There are entire books written about obtaining and then refining bounds - which appear to be nothing more than inequalities. There is great real-world value to be derived from seeing 'inequalities' as tools to leverage. Brian Kernighan once commented that controlling software complexity is the essence of programming [0]. I believe similar thinking applies to other aspects of software engineering, and product and business development. If you can take a hard problem, and bound its complexity, then you can say "the problem is no more complex than this". This is very useful. The chief value proposition of many SaaS businesses is the trivialisation of the upper bounds of complexity of hard problems. For instance, for many developers, Heroku makes the complexity of deployment very low. [0] http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/ http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/