Describing it as "moral support" really sells it short. Imagine computer science without sorting algorithms, search algorithms, etc that have been proven corre

Describing it as "moral support" really sells it short. Imagine computer science without sorting algorithms, search algorithms, etc that have been proven correct and have known proven properties. This math serves the same purpose as CS theory. So yes, if you're just fitting a model from a library like Keras, you're not really "using" the math. If you're working with data sets below a certain size, problems below a certain level of complexity, and models that have been deployed for many years and have well studied properties, you can do a lot with only a cursory understanding of the math, much like you can write perfectly functional web apps in Python or Java without really understanding how the language runtime works at a deep level. But if you don't actually know how it works, you're going to get stuck pretty badly if you encounter a situation that isn't already baked into a library. If you want to see what happens when you don't know the underlying math, look at the current generation of "data science" graduates, who don't know their math or statistics fundamentals. There are plenty of issues on the hiring side of course, but ultimately the reason those kids aren't getting jobs is that they don't actually know what they're doing, because they were never forced to learn this stuff.