When people say that "programming doesn't involve mathematics", I think they really mean that programming doesn't involve hard mathematics. It's obvious that computers can only calculate, and meta-calculation is mathematics. However, most people have this notion that math is hard, and many programming tasks are easy.

Then, you take a look at a distributed system. Every task is substantially harder in a distributed system. The answers are not obvious, so folks are more willing to accept that those things are math.