TITLE: Tools from other disciplines useful to mathematics research?
QUESTION [14 upvotes]: Obviously, mathematics provides essential tools for physicists, biologists, economists, engineers and many others to use in their research. Equally obviously, physics, biology, economy and engineering provide the inspiration for research topics and directions in mathematics. But this isn't what this question is about. Instead, I'm wondering about tools provided to mathematicians by other disciplines.
Are there any examples of tools (excluding software) from another discipline that you personally have used in your mathematical research?
E.g., I find dimensional analysis (as in assigning dimensionfull units to variables) a very useful tool from physics, which can greatly help in finding errors during algebraic manipulation of equations.

REPLY [2 votes]: It's not clear how useful this would actually be, but the idea of using "citizen science" (a somewhat sociology-based notion which has been developed into a useful tool for — primarily observation-based ­— scientific research by astronomers, botanists and zoologists, among others) for mathematics research has been floated here on MO: Can pure mathematics harness citizen science?. It would be nice to know whether any of the projects proposed in answers to that question ever came to fruition.