I agree about this correlation in general -- although personally I'm a counterexample: a degree in applied math, and a strong belief that it's not particularly

I agree about this correlation in general -- although personally I'm a counterexample: a degree in applied math, and a strong belief that it's not particularly important to programming. True, in programming you need to think rigorously and abstractly, and the same's true in math. However to be a great programmer you also need systems thinking, the engineering skills to use components that don't always work as advertised, understanding of social dynamics [both how software is constructed and how it gets used], etc. etc. Math doesn't give you any of these. So it seems to me that there are other ways to learn rigor and abstraction that are at least as good a preparation for programming as math: different branches of science, law, operations research, user experience, etc. etc.