It's not quite the same. For other patents, your invention needs to be some device or method for doing something. Now, this invention was obviously designed wit

It's not quite the same. For other patents, your invention needs to be some device or method for doing something. Now, this invention was obviously designed with math, but only the end result is patentable. That is, if you design some novel tire (for example), only the itself is protected--the math used to get the design in the first place is not protected. If somebody used the same math to come up with a different sort of tire, they would not have to license your patent. With software patents, there is no device or method. You're taking some math and patenting it just because it's being used on a general computing device. The program itself is not what's protected by the patent--it's the actual math the program is isomorphic to that's protected. Somebody could write a completely new program using the same mathematical foundations and it would infringe on the software patent. So yes, most patents are going to boil down to math one way or the other. The difference is that software patents protect the math directly where other patents only protect some specific device or invention.