“The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the design and implementation of software systems”

Alas! If only the current state of affairs were such that a future scholar would feel impelled to write a paper with this title, just like in 1960, when Eugene Wigner wrote his widely quoted “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. In the hope that at some future time it will improve the sorry state of software, let us consider how mathematics came to be “unreasonably” (i.e. surprisingly, mysteriously) effective in the natural sciences.