There is a very healthy (and mathematical) subdiscipline of software engineering, applied programming languages. My favorite software-engineering paper, Type-Based Access Control in Data-Centric Systems, comes with a verified proof that, in the system it presents, data-access violations (i.e.: privacy bugs) are impossible.
This is my own research area ( http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/plaid/ ), but my belief that this was a healthy part of a diseased discipline is a large part of the reason I accepted the position.
There is a very healthy (and mathematical) subdiscipline of software engineering, applied programming languages. My favorite software-engineering paper, Type-Based Access Control in Data-Centric Systems, comes with a verified proof that, in the system it presents, data-access violations (i.e.: privacy bugs) are impossible.
This is my own research area ( http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/plaid/ ), but my belief that this was a healthy part of a diseased discipline is a large part of the reason I accepted the position.