When Boyd saw them, he reacted as if he had been handed the Ten commandments. He sat sown and reverently turned the pages. Christie realized that Boyd had the ability to look at pages of numbers and visualize their meaning. He could look at what to most people would be a confusing jumble of arcane math and see an airplane with the variable of altitude, airspeed, temperature, angle of bank, and G-load. As Boyd sat at the table, his head moved and his shoulders rolled and his fist pulled back on the stick and he mumbled as he flew the numbers. He said to Christie, "The charts sing to me. I hear music when I read them."
....
Several days later the two men were driving to Andrews AFB outside Washington when Boyd went into one of his trances. He stopped talking and stared out the window. A few minutes later he snapped out of it, turned to Riccioni, and said, "Tiger, I'm plotting some E-M data and I need to know how to take a derivative of --"
"You're plotting E-M data?" Riccioni interrupted. "In your head?"
In the mathematics doctoral program at MIT, Riccioni had studied disciplines and schools and theorems that Boyd had never heard of. But Riccioni could not plot E-M data in his head. He could not visualize the charts. He could not hear the music.
, Boyd : The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, p. 146 & 241. (link is to Amazon)
