[sandee]

" A real engineer applies physical laws to create a product with some certainty of functioning properly."

"Most/all people who call themselves software engineers are not engineers. I'm not convinced that software engineering itself is actually a field of engineering, for that very reason."

Extracting meaningful information from a corpus of documents involves dealing with physical laws.Identifying spam deals with physical laws. So do a lot of other problems which often have strong mathematical theory. Mathematics is lot abstract and often comes before the physics of things.