Image thinking and Concept thinking

These days, my boss and I have discussed some times for a particular problem... But, we always have different thinking directions even though have the same goal, which results in many confusions of both of us...

Today, an idea flashed in my mind... maybe we have different thinking ways... My boss is a computer science professor who is quite good at math, even has some talent, while I am, I think, just a common student who has no talent on anything...So, the gap between us, I guess is that, I am using image thinking (visual thinking), while my professor is using concept thinking (abstract thinking).

For a particular algorithm, I must translate this algorithm to have a physical meaning for understanding it. But my professor can just read these symbols or some math formulation to have a abstract overall view of this algorithm. For example, considering the pagerank algorithm, I understand it by make the nodes like a water bucket and make the links like water pipes, then I can imagine when pagerank running, it is just like water moving or transferring from one bucket to another. But my professor will have an overall view based on the math, which I can't describe, because it is beyond my thinking knowledge/scale...

For designing an algorithm, I prefer to a heuristic way, maybe my boss will prefer a math way to derive it from another idea...

I am not quite sure that my image thinking is bad... Oh, I remember that when I was in middle school, my physics is much better than math, perhaps top 1 on physics in class but just top 10 on math in class... But I have to admit that most people have image thinking, which means concept thinking people is much more precious...and have some advantages in many fields..