I forgot something: whenever you ask a question like this you'll get two types of answers:
- It's very important if you want to fully comprehend what your code is doing. - These are the people who study math.
- It's not that important as long as you think logically. - These are the people who haven't studied math.
So it all comes down to who you want to believe: the arrogant mathematicians who are trying to artificially inflate what they do, or the non-mathematicians who are commenting on something they don't fully understand :).