Hacker News Reader

Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Computer science largely falls under the old dictum, "if it has the word 'science' in the name it isn't one".

Yes and no. While computer science research tend to overlap with other domains of study, there are many avenues of study that fall souly within it, Encryption, algorithms, discovery and application of probabilistic and logical laws. Just because you mostly hear about computer scientists running off and being programmers, dose not mean there is not serious research going on.

Be careful not to confuse science with pure mathematics.

The math in computer science may not be much like the usual idea of science, but neither is it what people ordinarily mean when they say "pure mathematics." It's much more nearly "applied mathematics," like statistics or signal processing or control theory: more likely to be interested in, e.g., the development of wavelets than in a proof of the Poincare conjecture.

Maybe it would've been more logical if the applied math end of the CS field had ended up with an applied-math-y name comparable to "statistics", e.g. "algorithmics" or "algorithmic analysis," and much of the rest of the CS field had ended up "software engineering" or "computer engineering" or "computational engineering" or "information system engineering" by analogy with "electrical engineering." But naming of technical fields is not necessarily systematically logical, sometimes because of old idiosyncratic reasons to avoid ambiguity with other pursuits: "astronomy" vs. "astrology," anyone?

Software engineering may be (currently) part of CS, but theoretical CS is more than just applied statistics. The halting problem, one of the most famous undecidable problems, is pure math and is CS. Lambda calculus is CS and is pure math.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com