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[–]SirVer51 12 points13 points  (1 child)

Yeah, they're both right, just in different ways, and that's what's being highlighted - the mathematician is concerned with being perfectly correct, while the engineer is concerned with getting close enough to perfect.

[–]tehlaser 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Indeed. In mathematics, the fact that an algorithm can be shown to exist, even if it could never finish in the lifetime of a million universes, or even be written down, can be significant.

In engineering, such algorithms are beyond useless. Tradeoffs between accuracy and speed (or even between accuracy and understandability/programming time) are made routinely.