The difference to me is one of directionality - maths research is seeing a far off island and getting there by hook or by crook; bridge, draining the swamp, inventing an airplane or boat, whatever it takes. Software engineering is like covering a plain with tiles - every feature is ultimately filled in and the underlying beauty is obscured by a fractal of complexity required by the ever growing requirements.
Ookay.
Back in the day i was confused by 'Linear programming', which is optimisation and has nothing to do with coding.
> every feature is ultimately filled in and the underlying beauty is obscured by a fractal of complexity required by the ever growing requirements.
Right. I would say Mathematics tries to unobscure (patterns in) nature. Engineering is creating tools, sometimes leveraging natural patterns. But yeah, Fourier or Laplace definitely created tools, too.
Every time.
That said, I do think "honeymoon phases" are a real source of bias. But then I don't think he's going through one of those either. He's been trying to leverage these models for a while now after all.
He might still be under a more general "tech adoption trend" bias, but at that point I'd say the lines become a bit blurry.