You may be taking too rigid a notion of CS...a lot of CS programs at least in American Universities are math programs...I got a minor in Applied math merely by declaring my desire for it without any extra classes. I would have gotten a double major in Applied Math and CS if I was willing to spend another semester in undergrad...point being Math and CS are not as far off.
Out of curiosity, what university did you go to? I attended the University of Texas and there was very little overlap between the math and CS curriculums [1].
The classes in common were lower division calculus (8 or 12 hours, depending if you took the condensed accelerated version), linear algebra (3 hours), and probability (3 hours).
Students could of course take more math electives, but you could get a CS degree with just 14 hours of math [2] [3] [4].
[2] Discrete math is a requirement for CS, but not for math, so I didn't count it. If you include it, that raises the number of hours to 17. Either way, that's only a semester's worth of math.
[3] CS students are required to take 24 hours of upper division electives, many of which are math oriented, but based on this list, it'd still be possible to fill those 24 hours with non-math related topics: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/undergraduate-program/academics/cu...
[4] I realize that many classes in the core CS curriculum are math oriented, like algorithms, however this would not fulfill a math requirement. One couldn't pick up a minor in math based on the core curriculum alone and would need to deliberately add math electives.
It depends very much on the school. I attended two different programs. The first was a software engineering degree with IMHO an entirely insufficient math requirement of basically calculus plus a combined discrete math and linear algebra lower division class. The second university didn’t have a computer science program per se — they had a math degree plus algorithms class and called it a computer science concentration.
Having been through both I can see the logic of both approaches.
I attended the New Jersey Institute of Technology (it's been >10yrs so things may have changed)...the curriculum may not exactly overlap but with thoughtful selection of electives you can get pretty close.
Similar. The BS at my school hadn’t all the math of a minor. The BA was lighter on math, but many would use it to double major in math since the CS courseload was lighter.
