I really wish that were the case at the University I attended. CS is really math, I completely agree. Software design and programming are not CS. They're engineering, and should be treated as such. And yeah, that does confuse the hell out of people, even CS people. Sometimes they get ridiculously defensive when I say things like "CS is a bullshit field. It's the bastard child of mathematics and electrical engineering, and the theory should be in the math department. The programming should be in the engineering department." :D

After reading these replies, I take my "more intelligent" comment back. :) It was out-of-line, no doubt. It's just been my experience that intelligence has been more concentrated in mathematics. That isn't to say CS people are "stupid" in any way. It's just that the smart:"just there because I grew up playing video games" ratio in CS is way lower than it is in math. In mathematics, I learned how to abstract things in a very logically rigorous way. I learned how to model various situations with various techniques in the most general (and hence widely-applicable) ways possible. CS taught me, aside from all the nuts-and-bolts stuff (which I taught myself long before I went to college) how to tie much of the mathematics together to develop algorithms and wider theoretical systems that would produce valuable things in a less abstract domain. So, CS and mathematics go hand-in-hand. Well, CS wouldn't exist if it weren't for Church, Turing, Kleene, Godel, etc. (mathematicians) either. :) You've hit the nail on the head with this one, and it's something that I've been dying to hear from other people: CS is about theoretical systems, not programming.

Yeah... I majored in pure math (e.g. abstract, theoretical stuff) in college. I was good. The NSA was all over me. I didn't accept, obviously (I wouldn't be able to admit this if I had. :) They recruit lots and lots of math people. Very few CS people (I double-majored in math and CS. Google and MS tried to recruit me through CS). However, I will get flamed to the end of the earth for this, but it's my experience: Mathematicians are insanely more intelligent than CSers. That, and cryptography (which is why the NSA exists) has much more to do with mathematics (Algebra and Number Theory especially) than it does with programming or OS design.