[latency-guy]

In this matter, my opinion of statistics is that it does not really teach 'math', it teaches how to use 'math' to derive information. Pretty much applied math.

I see this question as 'Why does math students not take Thermal Mechanics' or 'Why does math students not take Nuclear Methods'. The answer is just that, they do not teach math, they teach an application of math. Your math knowledge has not really grown.

[Tainnor]

That's quite close to saying that applied maths is not maths, which many people would disagree with. If you have definitions, theorems, proofs, I'd say that's maths, and you definitely have that in a sufficiently rigorous statistics course.

Of course, then there's the fact that statistics builds upon probability theory, and probability theory is, in a sense, a subfield of measure theory which in turn is about as mathematical as it gets (in the discrete setting, it also includes a fair amount of combinatorics).

[mindcrime]

Pretty much applied math.

Well... yeah. I mean, I might be wrong, but my default assumption is that when people on HN ask about learning math, unless they explicitly say otherwise, they are mainly interested in maths from an applied viewpoint. That is to say, I think most such inquiries are rooted in a basis of "I want to learn the math require to DO 'x'" where x might be "machine learning" or "circuit analysis" or whatever, as opposed to "I want to become a mathematician and advance the overall state of mathematics as a field."

I say that at least in part because of an assumption that people who want to become mathematicians per-se are probably asking their questions on Mathoverflow or whatever, and not HN.

EDIT: to be fair the specific sub-thread we're in here does contain this, which I guess justifies taking a "pure mathematics" position in this part of the overall discussion.

Are probability and statistics not part of a regular mathematics curriculum?

Still though, this seems to be a general issue with any maths related discussion on HN. It seems like a lot of people are commenting from a position of assuming that the initial question was based on an interest in pure / theoretical maths and the "I want to become a mathematician" idea. And I am somewhat skeptical that that is normally what's intended by the person asking the initial question.