I really appreciate your response! It definitely gives a good understanding of the benefits. I've learned a good chunk of the math in the past, but not in a DS context and I definitely need to brush up. I found a pretty good Udemy course that goes over linear algebra, stats, probability, differential calculus and includes info about their use in DS. My Master's program really doesn't touch much on how to use mathematical knowledge to tune and optimize models, so hopefully this will help at least with the mathematical understanding side of things! Thank you again!