Spot on. You may not need math if you are working on very very standard boring things, or on some system level stuff. However, the moment you need to work with real data and do cool things with it, you are often left SOL without the ability to figure out the math.
Many people grab a scientific toolkit (psipy and the like), but understanding what a Gaussian filter is vs calling a function for it, does an immeasurable amount of good anytime you need to decide what your particular dataset needs.
Many people grab a scientific toolkit (psipy and the like), but understanding what a Gaussian filter is vs calling a function for it, does an immeasurable amount of good anytime you need to decide what your particular dataset needs.