By the way "make use of work that other people already did" might be nice for getting something built fast but it may not be the best thing.
Any issue that involves writing fast code involves tradeoffs. If you sit down to write something new you may have different views on the tradeoffs than whoever wrote "the fastest" one.
Life ain't so black and white. In fact even these 'best of field' products tend to be ugly inside and unoptimized in places. (source: I develop linear algebra libraries)
Bonus: for low level ASM math, every "solved" problem (which by the way it wasn't) becomes unsolved the second Intel or AMD or whoever releases a new chip or coprocessor.