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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Computer science (disambiguation).

Fundamental areas of computer science

Programming language theory

Computational complexity theory

 Artificial intelligence

Computer architecture

Computer science

 History
 Outline
 Glossary
 Category

 v
 t
 e

Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation.[1][2]

[3]
Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of
computation, and information theory) to applied disciplines (including the design and
implementation of hardware and software).[4][5][6]

Algorithms and data structures are central to computer science.[7] The theory of
computation concerns abstract models of computation and general classes
of problems that can be solved using them. The fields of cryptography and computer
security involve studying the means for secure communication and preventing security
vulnerabilities. Computer graphics and computational geometry address the generation
of images. Programming language theory considers different ways to describe
computational processes, and database theory concerns the management of
repositories of data. Human–computer interaction investigates the interfaces through
which humans and computers interact, and software engineering focuses on the design
and principles behind developing software. Areas such as operating
systems, networks and embedded systems investigate the principles and design
behind complex systems. Computer architecture describes the construction of computer
components and computer-operated equipment. Artificial intelligence and machine
learning aim to synthesize goal-orientated processes such as problem-solving, decision-
making, environmental adaptation, planning and learning found in humans and animals.
Within artificial intelligence, computer vision aims to understand and process image and
video data, while natural language processing aims to understand and process textual
and linguistic data.

The fundamental concern of computer science is determining what can and cannot be
automated.[2][8][3][9][10] The Turing Award is generally recognized as the highest distinction in
computer science.[11][12]

History
Main article: History of computer science

History of computing

Hardware

 Hardware 1960s to present

Software

 Software
 Software configuration management
 Unix
 Free software and open-source software

Computer science

 Artificial intelligence
 Compiler construction
 Early computer science
 Operating systems
 Programming languages
 Prominent pioneers
 Software engineering

Modern concepts
 General-purpose CPUs
 Graphical user interface
 Internet
 Laptops
 Personal computers
 Video games
 World Wide Web
 Cloud
 Quantum

By country

 Bulgaria
 Eastern Bloc
 Poland
 Romania
 South America
 Soviet Union
 Yugoslavia

Timeline of computing

 before 1950
 1950–1979
 1980–1989
 1990–1999
 2000–2009
 2010–2019
 2020–present
 more timelines ...

Glossary of computer science

 Category

 v
 t
 e
 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) developed logic in a binary
number system and has been called the "founder of computer science".[13]

Charles Babbage is sometimes referred to as the "father of

computing".[14] Ada Lovelace published the first algorithm intended for

processing on a computer.[15]

The earliest foundations of what would become computer science predate the invention
of the modern digital computer. Machines for calculating fixed numerical tasks such as
the abacus have existed since antiquity, aiding in computations such as multiplication
and division. Algorithms for performing computations have existed since antiquity, even
before the development of sophisticated computing equipment.[16]

Wilhelm Schickard designed and constructed the first working mechanical calculator in
1623.[17] In 1673, Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated a digital mechanical calculator, called
the Stepped Reckoner.[18] Leibniz may be considered the first computer scientist and
information theorist, because of various reasons, including the fact that he documented
the binary number system. In 1820, Thomas de Colmar launched the mechanical
calculator industry[note 1] when he invented his simplified arithmometer, the first calculating
machine strong enough and reliable enough to be used daily in an office
environment. Charles Babbage started the design of the first automatic mechanical
calculator, his Difference Engine, in 1822, which eventually gave him the idea of the
first programmable mechanical calculator, his Analytical Engine.[19] He started
developing this machine in 1834, and "in less than two years, he had sketched out
many of the salient features of the modern computer".[20] "A crucial step was the
adoption of a punched card system derived from the Jacquard loom"[20] making it
infinitely programmable.[note 2] In 1843, during the translation of a French article on the
Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace wrote, in one of the many notes she included, an
algorithm to compute the Bernoulli numbers, which is considered to be the first
published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer.
[21]
Around 1885, Herman Hollerith invented the tabulator, which used punched cards to
process statistical information; eventually his company became part of IBM. Following
Babbage, although unaware of his earlier work, Percy Ludgate in 1909 published[22] the
2nd of the only two designs for mechanical analytical engines in history. In 1914, the
Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo published his Essays on Automatics,
[23]
and designed, inspired by Babbage, a theoretical electromechanical calculating
machine which was to be controlled by a read-only program. The paper also introduced
the idea of floating-point arithmetic.[24][25] In 1920, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of
the invention of the arithmometer, Torres presented in Paris the Electromechanical
Arithmometer, a prototype that demonstrated the feasibility of an electromechanical
analytical engine,[26] on which commands could be typed and the results printed
automatically.[27] In 1937, one hundred years after Babbage's impossible dream, Howard
Aiken convinced IBM, which was making all kinds of punched card equipment and was
also in the calculator business[28] to develop his giant programmable calculator,
the ASCC/Harvard Mark I, based on Babbage's Analytical Engine, which itself used
cards and a central computing unit. When the machine was finished, some hailed it as
"Babbage's dream come true".[29]

During the 1940s, with the development of new and more powerful computing machines
such as the Atanasoff–Berry computer and ENIAC, the term computer came to refer to
the machines rather than their human predecessors.[30] As it became clear that
computers could be used for more than just mathematical calculations, the field of
computer science broadened to study computation in general. In 1945, IBM founded
the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University in New York City.
The renovated fraternity house on Manhattan's West Side was IBM's first laboratory
devoted to pure science. The lab is the forerunner of IBM's Research Division, which
today operates research facilities around the world.[31] Ultimately, the close relationship
between IBM and Columbia University was instrumental in the emergence of a new
scientific discipline, with Columbia offering one of the first academic-credit courses in
computer science in 1946.[32] Computer science began to be established as a distinct
academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s.[33][34] The world's first computer science
degree program, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science, began at the University
of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1953. The first computer science department in
the United States was formed at Purdue University in 1962.[35] Since practical computers
became available, many applications of computing have become distinct areas of study
in their own rights.

See also: History of computing and History of informatics

Etymology and scope

See also: Informatics § Etymology

Although first proposed in 1956,[36] the term "computer science" appears in a 1959 article
in Communications of the ACM,[37] in which Louis Fein argues for the creation of
a Graduate School in Computer Sciences analogous to the creation of Harvard
Business School in 1921.[38] Louis justifies the name by arguing that, like management
science, the subject is applied and interdisciplinary in nature, while having the
characteristics typical of an academic discipline.[37] His efforts, and those of others such
as numerical analyst George Forsythe, were rewarded: universities went on to create
such departments, starting with Purdue in 1962.[39] Despite its name, a significant
amount of computer science does not involve the study of computers themselves.
Because of this, several alternative names have been proposed.[40] Certain departments
of major universities prefer the term computing science, to emphasize precisely that
difference. Danish scientist Peter Naur suggested the term datalogy,[41] to reflect the fact
that the scientific discipline revolves around data and data treatment, while not
necessarily involving computers. The first scientific institution to use the term was the
Department of Datalogy at the University of Copenhagen, founded in 1969, with Peter
Naur being the first professor in datalogy. The term is used mainly in the Scandinavian
countries. An alternative term, also proposed by Naur, is data science; this is now used
for a multi-disciplinary field of data analysis, including statistics and databases.

In the early days of computing, a number of terms for the practitioners of the field of
computing were suggested (albeit facetiously) in the Communications of the ACM—
turingineer, turologist, flow-charts-man, applied meta-mathematician,
and applied epistemologist.[42] Three months later in the same journal, comptologist was
suggested, followed next year by hypologist.[43] The term computics has also been
suggested.[44] In Europe, terms derived from contracted translations of the expression
"automatic information" (e.g. "informazione automatica" in Italian) or "information and
mathematics" are often used,
e.g. informatique (French), Informatik (German), informatica (Italian,
Dutch), informática (Spanish, Portuguese), informatika (Slavic
languages and Hungarian) or pliroforiki (πληροφορική, which means informatics)
in Greek. Similar words have also been adopted in the UK (as in the School of
Informatics, University of Edinburgh).[45] "In the U.S., however, informatics is linked with
applied computing, or computing in the context of another domain."[46]

A folkloric quotation, often attributed to—but almost certainly not first formulated by—
Edsger Dijkstra, states that "computer science is no more about computers than
astronomy is about telescopes."[note 3] The design and deployment of computers and
computer systems is generally considered the province of disciplines other than
computer science. For example, the study of computer hardware is usually considered
part of computer engineering, while the study of commercial computer systems and
their deployment is often called information technology or information systems.
However, there has been exchange of ideas between the various computer-related
disciplines. Computer science research also often intersects other disciplines, such
as cognitive science, linguistics, mathematics, physics, biology, Earth
science, statistics, philosophy, and logic.

Computer science is considered by some to have a much closer relationship with

mathematics than many scientific disciplines, with some observers saying that
computing is a mathematical science.[33] Early computer science was strongly influenced
by the work of mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von
Neumann, Rózsa Péter and Alonzo Church and there continues to be a useful
interchange of ideas between the two fields in areas such as mathematical
logic, category theory, domain theory, and algebra.[36]

The relationship between computer science and software engineering is a contentious

issue, which is further muddied by disputes over what the term "software engineering"
means, and how computer science is defined.[47] David Parnas, taking a cue from the
relationship between other engineering and science disciplines, has claimed that the
principal focus of computer science is studying the properties of computation in general,
while the principal focus of software engineering is the design of specific computations
to achieve practical goals, making the two separate but complementary disciplines.[48]

The academic, political, and funding aspects of computer science tend to depend on
whether a department is formed with a mathematical emphasis or with an engineering
emphasis. Computer science departments with a mathematics emphasis and with a
numerical orientation consider alignment with computational science. Both types of
departments tend to make efforts to bridge the field educationally if not across all
research.

Philosophy
Main article: Philosophy of computer science

Epistemology of computer science

Despite the word science in its name, there is debate over whether or not computer
science is a discipline of science,[49] mathematics,[50] or engineering.[51] Allen
Newell and Herbert A. Simon argued in 1975,

Computer science is an empirical discipline. We would have called it an experimental

science, but like astronomy, economics, and geology, some of its unique forms of
observation and experience do not fit a narrow stereotype of the experimental method.
Nonetheless, they are experiments. Each new machine that is built is an experiment.
Actually constructing the machine poses a question to nature; and we listen for the
answer by observing the machine in operation and analyzing it by all analytical and
measurement means available.[51]
It has since been argued that computer science can be classified as an empirical
science since it makes use of empirical testing to evaluate the correctness of programs,
but a problem remains in defining the laws and theorems of computer science (if any
exist) and defining the nature of experiments in computer science.[51] Proponents of
classifying computer science as an engineering discipline argue that the reliability of
computational systems is investigated in the same way as bridges in civil
engineering and airplanes in aerospace engineering.[51] They also argue that while
empirical sciences observe what presently exists, computer science observes what is
possible to exist and while scientists discover laws from observation, no proper laws
have been found in computer science and it is instead concerned with creating
phenomena.[51]

Proponents of classifying computer science as a mathematical discipline argue that

computer programs are physical realizations of mathematical entities and programs that
can be deductively reasoned through mathematical formal methods.[51] Computer
scientists Edsger W. Dijkstra and Tony Hoare regard instructions for computer
programs as mathematical sentences and interpret formal semantics for programming
languages as mathematical axiomatic systems.[51]

Paradigms of computer science

A number of computer scientists have argued for the distinction of three separate
paradigms in computer science. Peter Wegner argued that those paradigms are
science, technology, and mathematics.[52] Peter Denning's working group argued that
they are theory, abstraction (modeling), and design.[33] Amnon H. Eden described them
as the "rationalist paradigm" (which treats computer science as a branch of
mathematics, which is prevalent in theoretical computer science, and mainly employs
deductive reasoning), the "technocratic paradigm" (which might be found in engineering
approaches, most prominently in software engineering), and the "scientific paradigm"
(which approaches computer-related artifacts from the empirical perspective of natural
sciences,[53] identifiable in some branches of artificial intelligence).[54] Computer science
focuses on methods involved in design, specification, programming, verification,
implementation and testing of human-made computing systems.[55]

Fields
This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.
You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

Further information: Outline of computer science

As a discipline, computer science spans a range of topics from theoretical studies of

algorithms and the limits of computation to the practical issues of implementing
computing systems in hardware and software.[56][57] CSAB, formerly called Computing
Sciences Accreditation Board—which is made up of representatives of the Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS)[58]—
identifies four areas that it considers crucial to the discipline of computer science: theory
of computation, algorithms and data structures, programming methodology and
languages, and computer elements and architecture. In addition to these four areas,
CSAB also identifies fields such as software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer
networking and communication, database systems, parallel computation, distributed
computation, human–computer interaction, computer graphics, operating systems, and
numerical and symbolic computation as being important areas of computer science.[56]

Theoretical computer science

Main article: Theoretical computer science

Theoretical computer science is mathematical and abstract in spirit, but it derives its
motivation from practical and everyday computation. It aims to understand the nature of
computation and, as a consequence of this understanding, provide more efficient
methodologies.

Theory of computation
Main article: Theory of computation

According to Peter Denning, the fundamental question underlying computer science is,
"What can be automated?"[3] Theory of computation is focused on answering
fundamental questions about what can be computed and what amount of resources are
required to perform those computations. In an effort to answer the first
question, computability theory examines which computational problems are solvable on
various theoretical models of computation. The second question is addressed
by computational complexity theory, which studies the time and space costs associated
with different approaches to solving a multitude of computational problems.

The famous P = NP? problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems,[59] is an open
problem in the theory of computation.

Computational complexity
Automata theory Formal languages Computability theory
theory

Quantum computing
Models of computation Logic circuit theory Cellular automata
theory
Information and coding theory
Main articles: Information theory and Coding theory
Information theory, closely related to probability and statistics, is related to the
quantification of information. This was developed by Claude Shannon to find
fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on
reliably storing and communicating data.[60] Coding theory is the study of the properties
of codes (systems for converting information from one form to another) and their fitness
for a specific application. Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error
detection and correction, and more recently also for network coding. Codes are studied
for the purpose of designing efficient and reliable data transmission methods. [61]

Algorithmic information Signal detection Kolmogorov

Coding theory Channel capacity
theory theory complexity