You're right. In a sense, that's also true of comp sci academics and professionals. The field isn't a disciplined field (unlike mechanics). I think it's partly

You're right. In a sense, that's also true of comp sci academics and professionals. The field isn't a disciplined field (unlike mechanics). I think it's partly immaturity (mechanics is older); partly massive opportunity (everyone just reinvents everything); and partly the mathematical nature of comp sci... In my research, I've seen mathematical models reinvented with different technologies a decade later: e.g. first SGML and OODBMS; now XML and Java. The later writers are unaware of the earlier writers. There's very little knowledge of what's been published. It's hard to find, and hard to recognize because of different terminology. It can be very hard to recognize in a deeper sense, whether two domains (and algorithms operating on them) are actually equivalent (e.g. languages recognized by automata vs. languages generated by regular expressions). BTW: Ken Thompson patented his method for searching with regular expressions (expired 1988). http://www.google.com/patents?id=Cx9xAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&dq=3568156#PPA5,M1 http://www.google.com/patents?id=Cx9xAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a... As far as understanding the fundamentals of computer science, I think we are very poor at it - much of the mathematics is about very simple and basic stuff (though the mathematics itself is usually not so simple...). Mechanics can also be described by mathematics - arguably, is mathematics in a sense. I don't think that being mathematical is a killer for computer science patents.