I'm a little confused by your comment, but as someone with an advanced math degree I might just not have noticed what you're referring to. Can you point out what in the course you felt involved a heavy emphasis on math?
I realize many of these are "basic" problems for CS folks, but I don't have any CS training and never took a math course higher than high school pre-calculus (many moons ago), and learned programming on the job. I'm not criticizing the course, either--I am managing to pick up the language, but I just wanted to note both my struggles with the course, and the tacit prerequisite of a reasonable background in math.