I think this stems in part from the "oh I'm so bad at math" culture we have in the US, where its almost expected that most kids won't be good at mathematics. The side effect of this, imo, is that fields that are close to math or dependent on it (physics, stats, CS, etc.) pick up a piece of that stigma and idea that its acceptable to be bad at these things.
I've seen occasional articles about quants on wall street and how a good number of them are Russian/Eastern European (this kind of thing - https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-01-21/how-russi... ) and I feel this is another directly related element - having a strong math culture allows you to have a strong CS culture.
I've been happy to see that in the last decade, the US is starting to start bringing the pieces we need to get that kind of culture back - the popularity of startups and programming with the media that bring them to the attention of the average person. Space is cool again, and movies like "The Martian" are, imo, absolutely critical in making science/engineering something worth striving for. Hopefully we'll see some of this trickle down to our educational systems in the near future.
I've seen occasional articles about quants on wall street and how a good number of them are Russian/Eastern European (this kind of thing - https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-01-21/how-russi... ) and I feel this is another directly related element - having a strong math culture allows you to have a strong CS culture.
I've been happy to see that in the last decade, the US is starting to start bringing the pieces we need to get that kind of culture back - the popularity of startups and programming with the media that bring them to the attention of the average person. Space is cool again, and movies like "The Martian" are, imo, absolutely critical in making science/engineering something worth striving for. Hopefully we'll see some of this trickle down to our educational systems in the near future.