Comment by martincsweiss

I'm working on a piece inspired in large part by William Thurston's "On proof and progress in mathematics"[1]. Should publish it next week.

Part of why math is effective is that its extraordinarily compressible. And you can take those ideas and apply them elsewhere (composition works well). The natural world has a lot of detail and is therefore hard to compress. That's why it's a good source of new ideas. Consider the relation between the McCulloch–Pitts neuron (MCP lol)[2], developed to model biological spiking neural networks, and an inspiration for modern artificial neural networks.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron