What is CS? ======================================================================== 1. "Computer science has such intimate relations with so many other subjects that it is hard to see it as a thing in itself." -- Marvin Minsky 2. "Computer science differs from the known sciences so deeply that it has to be viewed as a new species among the sciences." -- Juris Hartmanis ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Boorstin, Daniel J. (1983), The Discoverers (New York: Random House), Ch. 49: "The Microscope of Nature": * "The hero of this story, Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), was a great scientist whose work had no dogmatic unity. He was one of the first of a new breed of explorers who defined their mission neither by the doctrine of their master nor by the subject that they studied. They were no longer "Aristotelians" or "Galenists." Their eponym, their mechanical godparent, was some device that extended their senses and widened their vistas. What gave his researches coherence was a new instrument. Malpighi was to be a "microscopist," and his science was "microscopy," a word first noted in English in Pepys' Diary in 1664. His scientific career was held together not by what he was trying to confirm or to prove, but by the vehicle which carried him on his voyages of observation." (p. 376.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Knuth, Donald (1974), "Computer Science and Its Relation to Mathematics", American Mathematical Monthly 81(4) (April): 323-343. "But computers are really necessary before we can learn much about the general properties of algorithms; human beings are not precise enough nor fast enough to carry out any but the simplest procedures." (323) "It has often been said that a person does not really understand something until he teaches it to someone else. Actually a person does not *really* understand something until he can teach it to a *computer*, i.e., express it as an algorithm." (327)