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The foundations of CS are things like sets, logic, formal languages, Turing machines, computability... all math. Maybe you didn't learn that stuff in "math cla
by troymc 14y ago
The foundations of CS are things like sets, logic, formal languages, Turing machines, computability... all math.
Maybe you didn't learn that stuff in "math class" but that doesn't mean it's not math.
- javert 14y agoI would say that logic is fudamental to math and cs. I disagree with mathematicians that claim that math is prior to logic. Formal languages, turing machines, and computability are computing science, which we call computer science. Computing science may be part of math, but math is not fundamental to it. In other words, you need logic as a basis for those examples, but otherwise, they are not dependent on other mathematical knowledge. I don't think sets are all that important in cs (but I disagree with mathematicians who try to base everything on set theory).
- learc83 14y agoYou're correct that most of computer science (except for the explicit mat classes you're required to take) doesn't inherently rely on existing math knowledge. However, they way computer science is taught does assume prior math knowledge. Thinking back to the very first example algorithms in my intro class--we had to impliment addition, multiplication, then heron's square root method. Very basic math, but that was around the time many students dropped the class.