[nxobject]

At the risk of diverging off from the original post, I also think that calling it "math" might make things a bit murky (and this is coming from someone who wanted to be algebraic topologist!)

It _is_ an elegant and minimal expression of a style of programming that is ubiquitous among dynamically-typed, garbage-collected languages. And it's a "theory" in the sense that it seems complete, and that you can think of ways to solve problems into Scheme and translate that into other dynamically-typed languages and still end with an elegant solution. Emphasis on the elegant (since minimal, wart-free, consistent and orthogonal, etc.).

Scheme was a simplification and a "cleaning up" compared to conventional Lisps of the time (lexical scoping, single shared namespace for functions and variables etc.)