In my opinion, good music typically comes from the flow state. In other words, less thinking and more practice/exploration leads to the best results.
From personal experience, pattern-recognition is the most useful "applied math" skill when making music. I use it when identifying intervals between notes, and chord progressions, which you need when you're trying to get the idea out of your head and onto the instrument you're playing or song you're writing.
This is really great. I read the Git config article, but I thought the image diff example was kinda lackluster. Im sure some better metrics could be extracted for a more descriptive diff.