At Princeton University, undergraduate math degree is A.B. (Bachelor of Arts), but undergraduate CS degree can be either A.B. or B.S.E (Bachelors of Science in Engineering) depending on course of study.
The "arts" in "Bachelor of Arts" refers to liberal arts, not to arts in the modern sense, as you are implying. The liberal arts are subjects that people who were free to pursue earthly endeavors (i.e., not slaves) were expected to study in order to fully distinguish themselves from the slave class. One example of this is reading and writing, which was a skill that free people were pretty much universally expected to have, and which slaves were often blatantly forbidden to acquire.
During the middle ages, the liberal arts grew to include geometry and arithmetic, and we now think of most math, even complicated math, to fall under the heading of the liberal arts.
In contrast, a BSE would cover other things, like architecture or chemical engineering.
baddox is therefore correct in questioning whether college math would fall into faculty of arts, which they should not, since faculty of arts these days means almost without exception faculty of studies of art, not faculty of the study of liberal arts. nolanw is either going to a very peculiar college, or is wrong.
I think there's been a big misunderstanding somewhere - I interpreted nolanw's "arts faculty" to mean liberal arts, not arts in the contemporary sense. So when I read baddox's reply I assumed he disagreed with how I interpreted it - i.e. I thought baddox was claiming math does not belong in the liberal arts. Heh...very confusing. What I'm trying to say is that there's a 99.9% chance that we're all in agreement and it really hinges on what nolanw really meant by "arts faculty".
My problem with Jobs quote is that it seems to imply that learning math is somehow not learning. Thus I assume he means liberal arts not as in mathematics or anything practical, but as in a pursuit that is mostly not immediately practical as one might argue about modern philosophy.
Jobs'own technologies are often based on solid computer science principles. I'm somewhat surprised that he could recognize the utility of these technologies yet not recognize the source of them.
