> I don’t think I’ve heard of elegant code leading to discovery on its own.

I’ve not heard of it either, but code is an abstraction of math, so I don’t see why this couldn’t theoretically happen.

Anecdotally, I’ve started spending time advancing my math skills beyond the early college level I stopped at and I’ve frequently found I already know concepts of more advanced math - I just didn’t know what they were called or how to apply them to an equation on paper, but I’ve been using them for years and intrinsically grasped the underlying academics.