As someone who got as far as diffeq in college math, and is working his way through fast.ai right now, the impression I get is of a field that's at the start of

As someone who got as far as diffeq in college math, and is working his way through fast.ai right now, the impression I get is of a field that's at the start of formalization. It's like they've got the basic operations like addition and subtraction, but multiplication is still on the horizon. Or like the early days of calculus when some mathematicians called it black magic.