Computations vs Problem Solving: Project Hail Mary musing

I recently read Project Hail Mary, and it had a really interesting detail that I enjoyed as a math professor. And the conversation was about intelligence and mathematics. You scroll on if you don't want really minor spoilers, but in the book, our human protagonist has met this alien, and him and the alien are doing science together. And the alien and the human have different strengths and weaknesses intellectually. So, for example, the alien is a much, much better calculator at performing sort of arithmetic and mathematical calculations than human is. In fact, the alien species doesn't have a computer, whereas the humans always having to go away and do calculations on the computer. — Nevertheless, the two species have this discussion where they observe that actually they're — kind of broadly speaking on similar levels of intelligence. And the author has his characters conjecture sort of evolutionary explanation for this, like, you know, there's certain level of evolutionary pressure to become the dominant species on their planet, something like this. But what I liked about it as a mathematician was that they were both really good at the problem-solving part of science. And they both were able to work together and advance the scientific challenges in the book. And to me, I thought this was important, our human protagonist, despite being weaker at calculation, would often go off and for quite a while with pen and paper do a bunch of calculations on, you know, for example, the orbit of what the spaceship was going to have to be. And what I liked about this is that to me, being a mathematician is about that problem-solving and that reasoning and that creativity, which both species were actually really good at. And the sort of pure arithmetic calculation side, okay, one of those species had that stronger than the other, that was certainly the case. But they could both do science and work together. And as just a math professor, I mean, this is what I really appreciate with my students, it's not how fast you can go and calculate a Kepler or something like this. It's that ability and willingness and attitude, which our human protagonist definitely had, to say, well, I got a problem, I'm going to go and math it out, I'm going to figure do that problem-solving. And that's the kind of math that I think all of us are actually good at.