Programming

I wouldn't necessarily say it "tells us something about reality", as the expression goes, but it is useful in describing reality. Like the last statement of waves, which was supposed to be an spaced out exageration, is how much of physics is built. You look at something and wonder how to describe it. Sometimes it make sense to start with a single pulse, wave, or oscillator, which does not solve it completely and so you add more perturbations to it. You do this sort of stuff basically everywhere in physics. Everywhere else, some other correspondence usually appear. In computer science you use hard problems to design cryptos, physics gets stuck at the same problems. String theory uses algebraic geometry and end up with models where the areas they cannot solve is where elliptic curve crypos come from.