[SulphurCrested]

A background in "pure maths" is extremely useful. You don't necessarily have to remember many (or perhaps any) of the particular definitions and theorems, but the ability to formulate definitions and prove results about them is valuable. I've seen software documentation that actually assumes it. This is what mathematicians call "mathematical sophistication".

For example, proof by induction is the same basic idea as terminating recursion.

Other things in computing were designed by mathematicians and kind of assume you see things a bit that way. The pointer arithmetic and "inside out" declarations of C are perfectly sensible if you think mathematically – Dennis Ritchie was a mathematician. Likewise, Stroustrup's use of 0 for the nil pointer in C++ would have been understood without explanation by the people down the corridor from him at Bell Labs. Mathematicians often use 0 to represent some distinguished element of a set that is not necessarily a set of numbers.

An example of a specific use of maths in computing is relational databases. Relations are kinds of sets.

Some results in cooperating processes and distributed computing that software engineers should know are proven mathematically. If you can't read a proof, you can't read the paper/textbook and are reduced to "remembering" the result rather than internalising it.