I'm not sure! I've seen people who has started with procedural and OO languages instead of functional ones, and they are mostly uncapable of solving a simple functional problem, p.ex, a small counter! I don't think you'll need a Maths degree before you could do an (+ 2 3)...
Well, perhaps my view is tainted. I used to work with a guy (who had a maths background) who raved on and on about functional programming and how it was going to solve the world's problems. I never could work it out and I've been programming 15 years or more. Once, though, he explained a Haskel program which solved the 8-Queens chessboard problem and it sort of clicked with me. I could see what he was getting at when confronted by that problem and used functional programming to express a mathematical solution. But for beginners? No. It's too specialised, at least in my opinion.