computer science
the discipline that studies comp and info — what can be computed, how efficiently, and how information is processed by machines. born in the 1930s-40s when Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, and John von Neumann formalized the idea of a universal computing machine
in the crystal, computer science spans two domains:
- comp — algorithms, complexity theory, automata, compilers, formal verification, programming languages
- info — info/theory, entropy, compression, coding, channel capacity
branches
- theory of computation → comp (Turing machines, computability, complexity classes)
- algorithms and data structures → comp (algorithms, data structures, optimization)
- programming languages → comp (compilers, type theory, formal verification)
- systems → comp (operating systems, distributed systems, databases)
- networking → info + comp (protocols, routing, bandwidth) AI and ML → splits into its own discipline: artificial intelligence cryptography → splits into crypto/graphy
key figures
Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Edsger Dijkstra, Linus Torvalds