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Computer science is definitely a science. Mathematics is a science and computer science is part of mathematics. Thus computer science is a study of computation
by hristov 16y ago
Computer science is definitely a science. Mathematics is a science and computer science is part of mathematics. Thus computer science is a study of computation or the automatic solution of problems or processing of data, etc.
The problem is that in most universities the computer science label is used for things that aren't computer science. Most computer science departments are mostly concerned not with studying or extending the science part of computer science, but with applying computer science to solve real world problems. This really should be called computer engineering or software engineering, just as applying certain aspects of physics to create electrical devices is called electrical engineering.
- ced 16y agoMathematics is a science Most people would disagree with that, though interestingly, that was not the case in the 19th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_scie... It's all semantics, and not worth arguing much. But nevertheless, it's good to keep in mind that mathematics is about deduction. It starts from axioms and tries to find all of their consequences. Science is about inference, trying to figure out the axioms given the observable consequences. Maths is bottoms-up, science is top-down. [That's not the entire truth. Platonism in maths is a nice counterpoint to the above. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Platonism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Plato...] My vote goes to CS being a branch of maths.
- dandrews 16y agoCiting Gödel's incompleteness and Turing's incomputability, Gregory Chaitin says (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/cordoba.html http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/cordoba.html) that "mathematics is different from physics, but maybe not as different as most people think". Perhaps CS is a math, but investigating CS sometimes necessarily employs science. As you say: not worth arguing much.