I basically disagree. In my opinion, the main mathematical requirement of the book is not knowing how to add fractions and such, but a reasonable amount of math

I basically disagree. In my opinion, the main mathematical requirement of the book is not knowing how to add fractions and such, but a reasonable amount of mathematical maturity, and many people reading the book will not have this. When I say mathematical maturity, I mean the kind of basic “real” mathematics that is normally taught only at universities, specifically the idea of what a proof is, what one looks like, how to write one, how to read definitions, and some idea of how one might analyse a problem and work towards its solution. For example, exercise 1.10 defines the Ackerman function and asks some questions about it. The Ackerman function does not fit the model of any function one might typically encounter in mathematics before this course, it’s definition is hard to reason about, and solving the exercise requires understanding certain cases of the Ackerman function (and not trying to figure it out all at once) and also having a good understanding of various mathematical operations (e.g. +, *, ^, which seems simple but spotting the pattern might not be so easy). Exercise 1.13 is about proving a closed form for fib(n) which requires a reasonable amount of mathematics and no programming whatsoever. Thankfully the hint gives one some kind of clue as to how to solve it or I think many would find the mathematical bar too high. Immediately following this is a chapter introducing orders of growth (big-O and friends) which is fine for anyone with a decent background in mathematics or computer science but one must remember that there is a difference between the abstract manipulation of symbols and vague graph-sketching one does in school (e.g. e^x is flat and then shoots up a bit past 0, x^2 shoots up either side of zero, x^3 goes up on the right and down on the left ...) and having a good understanding of how these functions behave and compare. Exercise 1.19 essentially requires a careful and correct analysis of the Fibonacci sequence (thankfully there are lots of hints) to derive a logarithmic algorithm for computing fib(n). This is essentially the “matrix exponentiation method” except that the matrix is hidden in three variables. I think it is silly to say that all you need is to be able to understand arithmetic to solve these. I think the book is fine for a course that happens after (or possibly concurrently with) a first course in real mathematics. It is probably less useful if one is lacking in the mathematical background required, and I think it is reasonable for people studying a “first course in computer science” to not have this mathematical background.