Ah so you are an academic. I have been in both places. Industry people have to not only think of ideas but implement them with real computers. In some cases the computers must be built specifically to solve the problems. Millions of lines of code, broken shit, backward compatibility, stuff that can only be found through years of use. I suppose one can try to make an academic problem out of any industry concern, and therefore appear to be "more sophisticated" but inferior, partial, and broken proposals are regularly published. To get published, even a sketch of a possible solution with no implementation often flies. In industry, a lot of inferior stuff is accepted out of necessity, but it's often do or die with deadlines and real budgets to be concerned about.
I'm not saying it's math-heavy, but it's not necessarily simple. Also, just because something has math, doesn't mean it's more complicated than everything else.
Ah so you are an academic. I have been in both places. Industry people have to not only think of ideas but implement them with real computers. In some cases the computers must be built specifically to solve the problems. Millions of lines of code, broken shit, backward compatibility, stuff that can only be found through years of use. I suppose one can try to make an academic problem out of any industry concern, and therefore appear to be "more sophisticated" but inferior, partial, and broken proposals are regularly published. To get published, even a sketch of a possible solution with no implementation often flies. In industry, a lot of inferior stuff is accepted out of necessity, but it's often do or die with deadlines and real budgets to be concerned about.