[fredophile]

In the post I originally replied to you mentioned a bunch of classes. Each of them, with the possible exception of software engineering, is a small portion of computer science. You could spend your whole career as a programmer and never touch a database or networked code. Even though theoretical computer science might be a small part of CS, everyone needs to use it to some degree even if they don't realize it. Can I compute X? That's theoretical computer science. Is algorithm A faster than algorithm B? Theoretical computer science again.

You also compared CS to physics and chemistry which is a bad comparison. Physics and chemistry don't have an equivalent foundation to theoretical comp sci. I'd also argue that comp sci isn't a science at all. What I do on a daily basis as a programmer is closer to plumbing than it is to science.

[mcguire]

"Physics and chemistry don't have an equivalent foundation to theoretical comp sci."

Either that's not true, or there are an awful lot of physicists and chemists out there wondering why they took so many math courses.

[fredophile]

Physics and chemistry use math but are not math. You can't point to an area of math and say "this is physics" or "this is chemistry." There is no chemistry without chemicals. There is no physics without physical processes. In contrast, there are areas of what we now call computer science that are math and predate computers.

[Jensson]

You have mathematical physics, which is math. It is about treating physics as math, meaning you have axioms for the different laws of physics and then explore the topic that way. It doesn't care about experiments at all, it is just pure math. They still haven't properly formalized all of current physics that way, so it is ongoing work.