Tell that to Claude Shannon, Fred Brooks, and Ken Thompson. "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits", "The Mythical Man-month" and "On Trusting Trust" have aged fine, I promise.
C. Shannon, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" (1940): https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/11173/3454142...
Shannon's master's thesis, which introduces boolean algebra to the field of digital circuit design.
R.W. Hamming, "Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes" (1950): https://ia801903.us.archive.org/1/items/bstj29-2-147/bstj29-...
In Hamming's own words: "Damn it, if the machine can detect an error, why can't it locate the position of the error and correct it?"
J.T. Kajiya, "The Rendering Equation" (1986): http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ravir/274/15/papers/p143-kajiya.pdf
Kajiya introduces the integral rendering equation, which is the basis for most current techniques of physically based rendering.
"A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", 1938, proves that you can use electrical switches to do boolean algebra! He basically invented the digital computer, as a master's thesis.
Sometimes, going back to relay logic helps. For instance, Clause Shannon's BSTJ Jan.1948 paper, "The Synthesis of Two-Terminal Switching Circuits". Or his 1940 master's thesis, A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits (http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173)