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I agree (as somebody else pointed out) these are more about software engineering (and I don't see a contradiction in being both, many people we consider physici

by js8 5y ago

I agree (as somebody else pointed out) these are more about software engineering (and I don't see a contradiction in being both, many people we consider physicists today were also engineers in their time). Although I will point out, there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_program_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_program_theorem which is a mathematical statement. Whether to actually follow that result when building software is a matter of engineering taste, but the theorem tells you, at the very least, you can do so.

btilly 5y ago
Let's see. Dijkstra introduced the A* graph search algorithm. Knuth wrote THE classic algorithms book. Peter Naur is best known for his work on parsing (he is the N in BNF notation). Even if you try to draw a distinction between computer science and software engineering, most of the people writing those papers were pretty squarely on the computer science side. But I don't draw that distinction. ALL of them were tenured professors of computer science. ALL of them were published in journals of computer science. There is no valid basis on which you can draw an artificial line between computer science and non-computer science, and put those outside of computer science. Doubly not if your goal is to say that computer science is a subset of mathematics rather than its own thing.
- js8 5y ago
  Your claim (as you explain elsewhere) seems to be that because discipline of software engineering exists and is related to computer science (and there is a fuzzy boundary between the two), we cannot think of computer science as a subfield of mathematics. I honestly don't see how that follows. Does the fact that writing LAPACK required software engineering mean that numerical linear algebra is not a part of mathematics? My basis for grouping them together is because of the subjects under study and research methods used. You can always claim that two different fields are different, but I think making arguments for some relationship is more useful.
  - btilly 5y ago
    My claim is not that software engineering is related to computer science, it is that software engineering IS PART of computer science. And being part of it, means that computer science is not merely an applied subfield of mathematics. A truth that mathematicians and computer scientists accepted decades ago when computer science split off from mathematics into its own department. AS for your example of LAPACK, "The existence of evening, my dear Boswell, does not mean that day is the same as night." Numerical linear algebra is on a boundary between mathematics and computer science. There is a large boundary between math and computer science. But then again the same can be said of, say, math and physics. But by the time you're worried about how to use caching effectively, and make that work in a distributed computation, you're pretty far on the computer science side. Also your idea of grouping them because of research methods is problematic at best. For example machine learning research has a highly experimental flavor that does not fit in mathematics at all. Quantum computing contains a lot that is closer to a field of applied physics than of mathematics. And so on.

by js8 5y ago

btilly 5y ago

Let's see. Dijkstra introduced the A* graph search algorithm. Knuth wrote THE classic algorithms book. Peter Naur is best known for his work on parsing (he is the N in BNF notation). Even if you try to draw a distinction between computer science and software engineering, most of the people writing those papers were pretty squarely on the computer science side. But I don't draw that distinction. ALL of them were tenured professors of computer science. ALL of them were published in journals of computer science. There is no valid basis on which you can draw an artificial line between computer science and non-computer science, and put those outside of computer science. Doubly not if your goal is to say that computer science is a subset of mathematics rather than its own thing.

js8 5y ago
Your claim (as you explain elsewhere) seems to be that because discipline of software engineering exists and is related to computer science (and there is a fuzzy boundary between the two), we cannot think of computer science as a subfield of mathematics. I honestly don't see how that follows. Does the fact that writing LAPACK required software engineering mean that numerical linear algebra is not a part of mathematics? My basis for grouping them together is because of the subjects under study and research methods used. You can always claim that two different fields are different, but I think making arguments for some relationship is more useful.
- btilly 5y ago
  My claim is not that software engineering is related to computer science, it is that software engineering IS PART of computer science. And being part of it, means that computer science is not merely an applied subfield of mathematics. A truth that mathematicians and computer scientists accepted decades ago when computer science split off from mathematics into its own department. AS for your example of LAPACK, "The existence of evening, my dear Boswell, does not mean that day is the same as night." Numerical linear algebra is on a boundary between mathematics and computer science. There is a large boundary between math and computer science. But then again the same can be said of, say, math and physics. But by the time you're worried about how to use caching effectively, and make that work in a distributed computation, you're pretty far on the computer science side. Also your idea of grouping them because of research methods is problematic at best. For example machine learning research has a highly experimental flavor that does not fit in mathematics at all. Quantum computing contains a lot that is closer to a field of applied physics than of mathematics. And so on.