Everyone already mentioned mathematics but I'd also like to mention Operations Research as a field that's basically all about translating complex business probl

Everyone already mentioned mathematics but I'd also like to mention Operations Research as a field that's basically all about translating complex business problems into mathematical models that can be efficiently solved. In practice this almost always means translating to the formats used by (Mixed) Integer Programming (MIP) solvers, Constraint Programming (CP) solvers or SAT solvers. Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers are used more in the formal verification realm, but they can also be used for the same purpose, the problems solved by these tools are all NP-complete so you can with more or less effort translate any NP problem to them.