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A famous MIT professor did a sabatical at our AI lab. He said it was "a joy to teach here, as you can rely on students being proficient in basic math as opposed to the US where you have to teach those explicitly or lose the class completely".

That was in the 1980s.

My first math exam as a CS undergraduate, 123 out of 129 students failed. The math department professors refused to dumb down their classes for CS students.

Math was core to the CS curicullum in those days. It would fade away over the next few decades to almost nothing. The main reason being the CS department wanted to popularize its uptake, and remove barriers that kept students from passing. There was also a major dose of interdepartemenral rivalry and academic politiking involved.

To be honest, there’s approximately zero reasons to teach major-grade math to just about anyone but math majors. None of the applied math disciplines need go that deep, and what they do need depends on the field (physics is all about analysis, CS is about algebra and discrete math, and so on).
My CS program required one year of upper division math. But you could take anything (I took set theory and meta-logic from the philosophy department, it was actually pretty hard!). They did not care about the specific math skills, they wanted us to have a level of mathematical formalism and reasoning, which was in fact important for the CS classes.
In terms of material learned maybe, in terms of shaping logical thinking and tackling hard problems there is a huge benefit.
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Can I ask, just out of curiosity, where the AI lab was?
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