Again, if you want to coast, collect grade inflated Bs and Cs, you can do without much rigor. If you want As and are ambitious, you have to master both CS and related math. Publish or perish is terrible, I agree; if you focus only on super hard high risk problems that might advance humanity, you'll get kicked out of university in no time. And as a professor, 90% of your time will be spent on chasing grants.
I am talking about scientific rigor, not grades. A more relevant question (at least to my interests) is “What tests does a scientific proposal have to pass to become an estabilshed scientific result?”
