Computer science is just a narrow field of mathematics.

Mathematicians like to introduce models to their work in order to be able to talk about some classes of problems more efficiently. For example, group theory is based on a model — albeit a very simple one — and mathematicians use this model to come up with problems which are hard but can be expressed in few words (because of the shared context of a model). Of course, as a consequence, mathematicians do come up with theorems that can later be shown to solve other problems and even fuel entire industries, but at the end of the day no mathematician creates these things hoping to make a buck.

Similarly, computer science is just a part of mathematics where a model of a universal computational machine (introduced by Turing) is studied. Problems are posed (such as, “can this machine solve every problem?”) and theorems are proven (such as, “I can sort this large set of numbers significantly faster than it takes you to list all pairs of these numbers”).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 12:24 and is filed under origins, reductions, technology, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.