Computer Science

Modified: 2020-03-27

History

• Computers used to be people
• Mathematics
  • Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica
    • Tried to formalize all of mathematics
    • Failed, but revealed much about complexity
    • foreshadowed Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem
  • Allen Turing
    • worked on Enigma decoding during WW II
    • Turing Test for AI (before computers were invented)
      • Can you tell if you are communicating with a human or a machine?
    • Universal Turing Machine (defines computability, software, hardware)
      • Purple code broken via software
      • Mac can emulate a PC via software
  • Jon von Neumann
    • Data and instructions could be in memory (basis for nearly all of today's computers)
  • Kurt Gödel
    • His incompleteness theorem demonstrated the limits to knowledge (one cannot ever know everything)

Computers and Computation Devices

• Abacus
• Antikythera Device
• Binary numbers (2020 is 11111100100 in binary notation)
• Pascal's mechanical adding machine
• Babbage's Analytical Engine
• Lovelace's algorithm
• Jacquard Loom
• Hollerith Tabulator
• Turing Machine (a concept, not a machine)
• Atanasoff-Berry-Computer @ Iowa State
• Mark I
• Eniac
• Bombes
• Transistor
  • "Transistor sister"
• Mainframes
• Hopper's "Bug"
• First department of Computer Science at Purdue, 1962
• Client-Servers
• Englebart's mouse
• Microprocessors
• Usenet
• Arpanet
• Microcomputers
• Tablets
• Cell phones
• Smart watches
• ?????
• History of Computers

Areas of Computer Science

• Mathmatical foundations
• Algorithms*
• Data Structures*
• AI*
• Communication*
• Security*
• Computer Architecture
• Computer Graphics
• Systems
• Databases
• Languages
• Software Engineering
  • Human Computer Interaction (HCI*)
• Theory*
• More CS

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