This is a very strange claim. Just off the top of my head, this definition of "mainstream mathematics" would exclude, for instance, Gödel's more famous theorems, a good bit of Grothendieck, some of the Bourbaki collective, and a huge amount of work from rather high profile mathematicians working today.
Yeah, perhaps you're right. I was trying to delineate what gets done in maths departments from what gets done in computer science, philosophy or other departments at universities while still falling under the umbrella of mathematics.
Stuff like type theory is rarely done in maths departments (though it sometimes is).
Mathematics (in the mainstream sense) is the study of space and quantity.