The point is that the formality of process description is mathematics. It may not be mathematics as you understand it, and that may largely be because you can i

The point is that the formality of process description is mathematics. It may not be mathematics as you understand it, and that may largely be because you can intuit a large part of what you are doing as you are doing it, and that's an unfamiliar feeling with math. But let's get this straight: cancelling out out the unnecessary steps or factoring out the common steps in a procedure is exactly the same thing as it would be in an algebraic expression. In the simplest application, it may not seem like there's anything "formal" or "mathematical" going on there, but that's only because it's simple and easy to spot. You can also look at four things and see four things without counting them, and divide them into two twos without doing anything that feels like division. Just because it doesn't feel like mathematics to you doesn't mean it isn't.