This is not true. There is plenty of PhD work being done in things like AI, distributed systems, databases, programming language design, programming language runtime design, and many other topics that are not mathematical.

There is plenty of work involving math, if you like, but there is a lot more to computer science than linked lists and finding strings inside strings.

Actually, I just checked and almost every CS field rests on substantial understanding of math, you can safely ignore the parent post.

I'm going to defend my Ph.D. in December. I agree with the parent post. Check my profile for my academic page, which has my publications. I do research related to systems for high performance computing. Not much math. Mathematical reasoning and understanding is needed, but the research is not math.

I'm going to steal from myself and just repeat this: I consider computer science to be everything concerned with computation in both the abstract and in implementation. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=968013 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1131606

Really? I can link you to about a million CS papers that do not mention formal math. And incidentally, this work is easy to apply directly to my day-to-day work as a practicing programmer.

(Some would say that means it's not academic enough... but you get the "Dr." title, so...)

Bullshit.

most CS PhD are funded - not much money, but you don't need to go into debt, which is unlike med or law school.