>>One of the beauties in math is that you never know where one thing will prove to be useful. Things which begin as pure theory suddenly get applied in a completely unexpected area. Differential geometry helped me a lot when I was first time applying walpaper to uneven walls :)
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>My wife and I have been married for over 35 years. Having a good background in math has helped me in many ways. One way has been with my wifes sewing. She will purchase too little material for a dress and then cry because she does not know what to do. I will lay out the patern so she can finish her project and she is very happy. Still I wish she would purchase the correct amount or even more material than is needed. Velvet is the most difficult material I have worked with.

My wife does that a lot - I mean, sews - and didn't really have that problem. She either has a good intuition on how much material to buy, or at times has intuitive approach at laying out the parts to cut.

Actually, I think that this ability of sewing, or more precisely the way she sees a ready dress where I only see a roll of fabric in the shop, is somewhat akin to our ability to know how will a class behave even before we wrote a single command, or the architect's vision of the house even before the first line is on paper.