Applied Math in Production

Most engineers treat math as something you learned in school and left there. That's a mistake.

Linear algebra is everywhere. Embeddings are vectors. Similarity search is dot products. PCA for dimensionality reduction.

Probability keeps you honest. "99.9% uptime" means 8 hours of downtime per year. A/B testing is hypothesis testing.

Optimization is the meta-skill. Load balancing, query planning, resource allocation — all optimization problems.

You don't need a math degree. You need mathematical fluency — the ability to recognize when a problem has a mathematical structure.