# Computer science

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Computer science deals with the theoretical foundations of computation and practical techniques for their application.

Computer science is the study of mathematical algorithms and processes that interact with data and that can be represented as data in the form of programs. It enables the use of algorithms to manipulate, store, and communicate digital information. A computer scientist studies the theory of computation and the practice of designing software systems. [1]

Mathematics includes the study of such topics as quantity, structure, space, and change.

In engineering, a process is a series of interrelated tasks that, together, transform inputs into outputs. These tasks may be carried out by people, nature or machines using various resources; an engineering process must be considered in the context of the agents carrying out the tasks and the resource attributes involved. Systems engineering normative documents and those related to Maturity Models are typically based on processes, for example, systems engineering processes of the EIA-632 and processes involved in the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) institutionalization and improvement approach. Constraints imposed on the tasks and resources required to implement them are essential for executing the tasks mentioned.

Data is a set of values of subjects with respect to qualitative or quantitative variables.

## Contents

Its fields can be divided into theoretical and practical disciplines. Computational complexity theory is highly abstract, while computer graphics emphasizes real-world applications. Programming language theory considers approaches to the description of computational processes, while computer programming itself involves the use of programming languages and complex systems. Human–computer interaction considers the challenges in making computers useful, usable, and accessible.

Computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty, and relating these classes to each other. A computational problem is a task solved by a computer. A computation problem is solvable by mechanical application of mathematical steps, such as an algorithm.

Computer graphics is a sub-field of Computer Science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Although the term often refers to the study of three-dimensional computer graphics, it also encompasses two-dimensional graphics and image processing.

Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of programming languages and their individual features. It falls within the discipline of computer science, both depending on and affecting mathematics, software engineering, linguistics and even cognitive science. It is a well-recognized branch of computer science, and an active research area, with results published in numerous journals dedicated to PLT, as well as in general computer science and engineering publications.

## History

The earliest foundations of what would become computer science predate the invention of the modern digital computer. Machines for calculating fixed numerical tasks such as the abacus have existed since antiquity, aiding in computations such as multiplication and division. Algorithms for performing computations have existed since antiquity, even before the development of sophisticated computing equipment.

The abacus, also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool that was in use in Europe, China and Russia, centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu–Arabic numeral system. The exact origin of the abacus is still unknown. Today, abacuses are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal.

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an unambiguous specification of how to solve a class of problems. Algorithms can perform calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning tasks.

Wilhelm Schickard designed and constructed the first working mechanical calculator in 1623. [4] In 1673, Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated a digital mechanical calculator, called the Stepped Reckoner. [5] He may be considered the first computer scientist and information theorist, for, among other reasons, documenting the binary number system. In 1820, Thomas de Colmar launched the mechanical calculator industry [note 1] when he released his simplified arithmometer, which was the first calculating machine strong enough and reliable enough to be used daily in an office environment. Charles Babbage started the design of the first automatic mechanical calculator, his Difference Engine, in 1822, which eventually gave him the idea of the first programmable mechanical calculator, his Analytical Engine. [6] He started developing this machine in 1834, and "in less than two years, he had sketched out many of the salient features of the modern computer". [7] "A crucial step was the adoption of a punched card system derived from the Jacquard loom" [7] making it infinitely programmable. [note 2] In 1843, during the translation of a French article on the Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace wrote, in one of the many notes she included, an algorithm to compute the Bernoulli numbers, which is considered to be the first computer program. [8] Around 1885, Herman Hollerith invented the tabulator, which used punched cards to process statistical information; eventually his company became part of IBM. In 1937, one hundred years after Babbage's impossible dream, Howard Aiken convinced IBM, which was making all kinds of punched card equipment and was also in the calculator business [9] to develop his giant programmable calculator, the ASCC/Harvard Mark I, based on Babbage's Analytical Engine, which itself used cards and a central computing unit. When the machine was finished, some hailed it as "Babbage's dream come true". [10]

Wilhelm Schickard was a German professor of Hebrew and Astronomy who became famous in the second part of the 20th century after Dr. Franz Hammer, a biographer of Johannes Kepler, claimed that the drawings of a calculating clock, predating the public release of Pascal's calculator by twenty years, had been discovered in two unknown letters written by Schickard to Johannes Kepler in 1623 and 1624.

A mechanical calculator, or calculating machine, is a mechanical device used to perform automatically the basic operations of arithmetic. Most mechanical calculators were comparable in size to small desktop computers and have been rendered obsolete by the advent of the electronic calculator.

Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar was a French inventor and entrepreneur best known for designing, patenting and manufacturing the first commercially successful mechanical calculator, the Arithmometer, and for founding the insurance companies Le Soleil and L'aigle which, under his leadership, became the number one insurance group in France at the beginning of the Second Empire.

During the 1940s, as new and more powerful computing machines were developed, the term computer came to refer to the machines rather than their human predecessors. [11] As it became clear that computers could be used for more than just mathematical calculations, the field of computer science broadened to study computation in general. In 1945, IBM founded the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University in New York City. The renovated fraternity house on Manhattan's West Side was IBM's first laboratory devoted to pure science. The lab is the forerunner of IBM's Research Division, which today operates research facilities around the world. [12] Ultimately, the close relationship between IBM and the university was instrumental in the emergence of a new scientific discipline, with Columbia offering one of the first academic-credit courses in computer science in 1946. [13] Computer science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s. [14] [15] The world's first computer science degree program, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science, began at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1953. The first computer science degree program in the United States was formed at Purdue University in 1962. [16] Since practical computers became available, many applications of computing have become distinct areas of study in their own rights.

Computing is any activity that uses computers. It includes developing hardware and software, and using computers to manage and process information, communicate and entertain. Computing is a critically important, integral component of modern industrial technology. Major computing disciplines include computer engineering, software engineering, computer science, information systems, and information technology.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. The company began in 1911, founded in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924.

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in Upper Manhattan, New York City. Established in 1754, Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence, seven of which belong to the Ivy League. It has been ranked by numerous major education publications as among the top ten universities in the world.

Although many initially believed it was impossible that computers themselves could actually be a scientific field of study, in the late fifties it gradually became accepted among the greater academic population. [17] [18] It is the now well-known IBM brand that formed part of the computer science revolution during this time. IBM (short for International Business Machines) released the IBM 704 [19] and later the IBM 709 [20] computers, which were widely used during the exploration period of such devices. "Still, working with the IBM [computer] was frustrating […] if you had misplaced as much as one letter in one instruction, the program would crash, and you would have to start the whole process over again". [17] During the late 1950s, the computer science discipline was very much in its developmental stages, and such issues were commonplace. [18]

Time has seen significant improvements in the usability and effectiveness of computing technology. [21] Modern society has seen a significant shift in the users of computer technology, from usage only by experts and professionals, to a near-ubiquitous user base. Initially, computers were quite costly, and some degree of humanitarian aid was needed for efficient use—in part from professional computer operators. As computer adoption became more widespread and affordable, less human assistance was needed for common usage.

### Contributions

Despite its short history as a formal academic discipline, computer science has made a number of fundamental contributions to science and society—in fact, along with electronics, it is a founding science of the current epoch of human history called the Information Age and a driver of the information revolution, seen as the third major leap in human technological progress after the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850 CE) and the Agricultural Revolution (8000–5000 BC).

These contributions include:

## Etymology

Although first proposed in 1956, [18] the term "computer science" appears in a 1959 article in Communications of the ACM , [30] in which Louis Fein argues for the creation of a Graduate School in Computer Sciences analogous to the creation of Harvard Business School in 1921, [31] justifying the name by arguing that, like management science, the subject is applied and interdisciplinary in nature, while having the characteristics typical of an academic discipline. [30] His efforts, and those of others such as numerical analyst George Forsythe, were rewarded: universities went on to create such programs, starting with Purdue in 1962. [32] Despite its name, a significant amount of computer science does not involve the study of computers themselves. Because of this, several alternative names have been proposed. [33] Certain departments of major universities prefer the term computing science, to emphasize precisely that difference. Danish scientist Peter Naur suggested the term datalogy, [34] to reflect the fact that the scientific discipline revolves around data and data treatment, while not necessarily involving computers. The first scientific institution to use the term was the Department of Datalogy at the University of Copenhagen, founded in 1969, with Peter Naur being the first professor in datalogy. The term is used mainly in the Scandinavian countries. An alternative term, also proposed by Naur, is data science; this is now used for a distinct field of data analysis, including statistics and databases.

Also, in the early days of computing, a number of terms for the practitioners of the field of computing were suggested in the Communications of the ACMturingineer, turologist, flow-charts-man, applied meta-mathematician, and applied epistemologist . [35] Three months later in the same journal, comptologist was suggested, followed next year by hypologist. [36] The term computics has also been suggested. [37] In Europe, terms derived from contracted translations of the expression "automatic information" (e.g. "informazione automatica" in Italian) or "information and mathematics" are often used, e.g. informatique (French), Informatik (German), informatica (Italian, Dutch), informática (Spanish, Portuguese), informatika (Slavic languages and Hungarian) or pliroforiki (πληροφορική, which means informatics) in Greek. Similar words have also been adopted in the UK (as in the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh). [38] "In the U.S., however, informatics is linked with applied computing, or computing in the context of another domain." [39]

A folkloric quotation, often attributed to—but almost certainly not first formulated by—Edsger Dijkstra, states that "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." [note 3] The design and deployment of computers and computer systems is generally considered the province of disciplines other than computer science. For example, the study of computer hardware is usually considered part of computer engineering, while the study of commercial computer systems and their deployment is often called information technology or information systems. However, there has been much cross-fertilization of ideas between the various computer-related disciplines. Computer science research also often intersects other disciplines, such as philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, mathematics, physics, biology, statistics, and logic.

Computer science is considered by some to have a much closer relationship with mathematics than many scientific disciplines, with some observers saying that computing is a mathematical science. [14] Early computer science was strongly influenced by the work of mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, Rózsa Péter and Alonzo Church and there continues to be a useful interchange of ideas between the two fields in areas such as mathematical logic, category theory, domain theory, and algebra. [18]

The relationship between Computer Science and Software Engineering is a contentious issue, which is further muddied by disputes over what the term "Software Engineering" means, and how computer science is defined. [40] David Parnas, taking a cue from the relationship between other engineering and science disciplines, has claimed that the principal focus of computer science is studying the properties of computation in general, while the principal focus of software engineering is the design of specific computations to achieve practical goals, making the two separate but complementary disciplines. [41]

The academic, political, and funding aspects of computer science tend to depend on whether a department formed with a mathematical emphasis or with an engineering emphasis. Computer science departments with a mathematics emphasis and with a numerical orientation consider alignment with computational science. Both types of departments tend to make efforts to bridge the field educationally if not across all research.

## Philosophy

A number of computer scientists have argued for the distinction of three separate paradigms in computer science. Peter Wegner argued that those paradigms are science, technology, and mathematics. [42] Peter Denning's working group argued that they are theory, abstraction (modeling), and design. [43] Amnon H. Eden described them as the "rationalist paradigm" (which treats computer science as a branch of mathematics, which is prevalent in theoretical computer science, and mainly employs deductive reasoning), the "technocratic paradigm" (which might be found in engineering approaches, most prominently in software engineering), and the "scientific paradigm" (which approaches computer-related artifacts from the empirical perspective of natural sciences, identifiable in some branches of artificial intelligence). [44]

## Fields

As a discipline, computer science spans a range of topics from theoretical studies of algorithms and the limits of computation to the practical issues of implementing computing systems in hardware and software. [45] [46] CSAB, formerly called Computing Sciences Accreditation Board—which is made up of representatives of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS) [47] —identifies four areas that it considers crucial to the discipline of computer science: theory of computation, algorithms and data structures, programming methodology and languages, and computer elements and architecture. In addition to these four areas, CSAB also identifies fields such as software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer networking and communication, database systems, parallel computation, distributed computation, human–computer interaction, computer graphics, operating systems, and numerical and symbolic computation as being important areas of computer science. [45]

### Theoretical computer science

Theoretical Computer Science is mathematical and abstract in spirit, but it derives its motivation from practical and everyday computation. Its aim is to understand the nature of computation and, as a consequence of this understanding, provide more efficient methodologies. All studies related to mathematical, logic and formal concepts and methods could be considered as theoretical computer science, provided that the motivation is clearly drawn from the field of computing.

#### Data structures and algorithms

Data structures and algorithms are the study of commonly used computational methods and their computational efficiency.

 O(n2) Analysis of algorithms Algorithms Data structures Combinatorial optimization Computational geometry

#### Theory of computation

According to Peter Denning, the fundamental question underlying computer science is, "What can be (efficiently) automated?" [14] Theory of computation is focused on answering fundamental questions about what can be computed and what amount of resources are required to perform those computations. In an effort to answer the first question, computability theory examines which computational problems are solvable on various theoretical models of computation. The second question is addressed by computational complexity theory, which studies the time and space costs associated with different approaches to solving a multitude of computational problems.

The famous P = NP? problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems, [48] is an open problem in the theory of computation.

 P = NP? GNITIRW-TERCES Automata theory Computability theory Computational complexity theory Cryptography Quantum computing theory

#### Information and coding theory

Information theory is related to the quantification of information. This was developed by Claude Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and communicating data. [49] Coding theory is the study of the properties of codes (systems for converting information from one form to another) and their fitness for a specific application. Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error detection and correction, and more recently also for network coding. Codes are studied for the purpose of designing efficient and reliable data transmission methods.

#### Programming language theory

Programming language theory is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of programming languages and their individual features. It falls within the discipline of computer science, both depending on and affecting mathematics, software engineering, and linguistics. It is an active research area, with numerous dedicated academic journals.

 ${\displaystyle \Gamma \vdash x:{\text{Int}}}$ Type theory Compiler design Programming languages

#### Formal methods

Formal methods are a particular kind of mathematically based technique for the specification, development and verification of software and hardware systems. The use of formal methods for software and hardware design is motivated by the expectation that, as in other engineering disciplines, performing appropriate mathematical analysis can contribute to the reliability and robustness of a design. They form an important theoretical underpinning for software engineering, especially where safety or security is involved. Formal methods are a useful adjunct to software testing since they help avoid errors and can also give a framework for testing. For industrial use, tool support is required. However, the high cost of using formal methods means that they are usually only used in the development of high-integrity and life-critical systems, where safety or security is of utmost importance. Formal methods are best described as the application of a fairly broad variety of theoretical computer science fundamentals, in particular logic calculi, formal languages, automata theory, and program semantics, but also type systems and algebraic data types to problems in software and hardware specification and verification.

### Computer systems

#### Computer architecture and computer engineering

Computer architecture, or digital computer organization, is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It focuses largely on the way by which the central processing unit performs internally and accesses addresses in memory. [50] The field often involves disciplines of computer engineering and electrical engineering, selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance, and cost goals.

 Digital logic Microarchitecture Multiprocessing Ubiquitous computing Systems architecture Operating systems

#### Computer performance analysis

Computer performance analysis is the study of work flowing through computers with the general goals of improving throughput, controlling response time, using resources efficiently, eliminating bottlenecks, and predicting performance under anticipated peak loads. [51]

#### Concurrent, parallel and distributed systems

Concurrency is a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other. A number of mathematical models have been developed for general concurrent computation including Petri nets, process calculi and the Parallel Random Access Machine model. A distributed system extends the idea of concurrency onto multiple computers connected through a network. Computers within the same distributed system have their own private memory, and information is often exchanged among themselves to achieve a common goal.

#### Computer networks

This branch of computer science aims to manage networks between computers worldwide.

#### Computer security and cryptography

Computer security is a branch of computer technology with an objective of protecting information from unauthorized access, disruption, or modification while maintaining the accessibility and usability of the system for its intended users. Cryptography is the practice and study of hiding (encryption) and therefore deciphering (decryption) information. Modern cryptography is largely related to computer science, for many encryption and decryption algorithms are based on their computational complexity.

#### Databases

A database is intended to organize, store, and retrieve large amounts of data easily. Digital databases are managed using database management systems to store, create, maintain, and search data, through database models and query languages.

### Computer applications

#### Computer graphics and visualization

Computer graphics is the study of digital visual contents and involves the synthesis and manipulation of image data. The study is connected to many other fields in computer science, including computer vision, image processing, and computational geometry, and is heavily applied in the fields of special effects and video games.

#### Human–computer interaction

Research that develops theories, principles, and guidelines for user interface designers, so they can create satisfactory user experiences with desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.

#### Scientific computing

Scientific computing (or computational science) is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and quantitative analysis techniques and using computers to analyze and solve scientific problems. In practical use, it is typically the application of computer simulation and other forms of computation to problems in various scientific disciplines.

 Numerical analysis Computational physics Computational chemistry Bioinformatics

#### Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) aims to or is required to synthesize goal-orientated processes such as problem-solving, decision-making, environmental adaptation, learning, and communication found in humans and animals. From its origins in cybernetics and in the Dartmouth Conference (1956), artificial intelligence research has been necessarily cross-disciplinary, drawing on areas of expertise such as applied mathematics, symbolic logic, semiotics, electrical engineering, philosophy of mind, neurophysiology, and social intelligence. AI is associated in the popular mind with robotic development, but the main field of practical application has been as an embedded component in areas of software development, which require computational understanding. The starting point in the late 1940s was Alan Turing's question "Can computers think?", and the question remains effectively unanswered, although the Turing test is still used to assess computer output on the scale of human intelligence. But the automation of evaluative and predictive tasks has been increasingly successful as a substitute for human monitoring and intervention in domains of computer application involving complex real-world data.

 Machine learning Computer vision Image processing Pattern recognition Data mining Evolutionary computation Knowledge representation and reasoning Natural language processing Robotics

### Software engineering

Software engineering is the study of designing, implementing, and modifying software in order to ensure it is of high quality, affordable, maintainable, and fast to build. It is a systematic approach to software design, involving the application of engineering practices to software. Software engineering deals with the organizing and analyzing of software—it doesn't just deal with the creation or manufacture of new software, but its internal maintenance and arrangement.

## Discoveries

The philosopher of computing Bill Rapaport noted three Great Insights of Computer Science: [52]

All the information about any computable problem can be represented using only 0 and 1 (or any other bistable pair that can flip-flop between two easily distinguishable states, such as "on/off", "magnetized/de-magnetized", "high-voltage/low-voltage", etc.).
• Alan Turing's insight: there are only five actions that a computer has to perform in order to do "anything".
Every algorithm can be expressed in a language for a computer consisting of only five basic instructions:
• move left one location;
• move right one location;
• read symbol at current location;
• print 0 at current location;
• print 1 at current location.
• Corrado Böhm and Giuseppe Jacopini's insight: there are only three ways of combining these actions (into more complex ones) that are needed in order for a computer to do "anything".
Only three rules are needed to combine any set of basic instructions into more complex ones:
• sequence: first do this, then do that;
• selection: IF such-and-such is the case, THEN do this, ELSE do that;
• repetition: WHILE such-and-such is the case DO this.
Note that the three rules of Boehm's and Jacopini's insight can be further simplified with the use of goto (which means it is more elementary than structured programming).

Programming languages can be used to accomplish different tasks in different ways. Common programming paradigms include:

• Functional programming, a style of building the structure and elements of computer programs that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It is a declarative programming paradigm, which means programming is done with expressions or declarations instead of statements.
• Imperative programming, a programming paradigm that uses statements that change a program's state. In much the same way that the imperative mood in natural languages expresses commands, an imperative program consists of commands for the computer to perform. Imperative programming focuses on describing how a program operates.
• Object-oriented programming, a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which may contain data, in the form of fields, often known as attributes; and code, in the form of procedures, often known as methods. A feature of objects is that an object's procedures can access and often modify the data fields of the object with which they are associated. Thus Object-oriented computer programs are made out of objects that interact with one another.

Many languages offer support for multiple paradigms, making the distinction more a matter of style than of technical capabilities. [53]

Conferences are important events for computer science research. During these conferences, researchers from the public and private sectors present their recent work and meet. Unlike in most other academic fields, in computer science, the prestige of conference papers is greater than that of journal publications. [54] [55] One proposed explanation for this is the quick development of this relatively new field requires rapid review and distribution of results, a task better handled by conferences than by journals. [56]

## Education

Computer Science, known by its near synonyms, Computing, Computer Studies, Information Technology (IT) and Information and Computing Technology (ICT), has been taught in UK schools since the days of batch processing, mark sensitive cards and paper tape but usually to a select few students. [57] In 1981, the BBC produced a micro-computer and classroom network and Computer Studies became common for GCE O level students (11–16-year-old), and Computer Science to A level students. Its importance was recognised, and it became a compulsory part of the National Curriculum, for Key Stage 3 & 4. In September 2014 it became an entitlement for all 7,000,000 pupils over the age of 4. [58]

In the US, with 14,000 school districts deciding the curriculum, provision was fractured. [59] According to a 2010 report by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), only 14 out of 50 states have adopted significant education standards for high school computer science. [60]

Israel, New Zealand, and South Korea have included computer science in their national secondary education curricula, [61] [62] and several others are following. [63]

### Challenges

In many countries, there is a significant gender gap in computer science education. In 2012, only 20 percent of computer science degrees in the United States were awarded to women. [64] The gender gap is also a problem in other western countries. [65] The gap is smaller, or nonexistent, in some parts of the world. In 2011, women earned half of the computer science degrees in Malaysia. [66] In 2001, 55 percent of computer science graduates in Guyana were women. [65]

## Notes

1. In 1851
2. "The introduction of punched cards into the new engine was important not only as a more convenient form of control than the drums, or because programs could now be of unlimited extent, and could be stored and repeated without the danger of introducing errors in setting the machine by hand; it was important also because it served to crystallize Babbage's feeling that he had invented something really new, something much more than a sophisticated calculating machine." Bruce Collier, 1970
3. See the entry "Computer science" on Wikiquote for the history of this quotation.
4. The word "anything" is written in quotation marks because there are things that computers cannot do. One example is: to answer the question if an arbitrary given computer program will eventually finish or run forever (the Halting problem).

## Related Research Articles

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is an international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947, and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, with nearly 100,000 members as of 2019. Its headquarters are in New York City.

Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. One well known subject classification system for computer science is the ACM Computing Classification System devised by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Computational archaeology describes computer-based analytical methods for the study of long-term human behaviour and behavioural evolution. As with other sub-disciplines that have prefixed 'computational' to their name, the term is reserved for methods that could not realistically be performed without the aid of a computer.

Information systems (IS) are formal, sociotechnical, organizational systems designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. In a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people, structure, and technology.

John Edward Hopcroft is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University.

Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on more mathematical topics of computing and includes the theory of computation.

A computer scientist is a person who has acquired the knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application.

Bio-inspired computing, short for biologically inspired computing, is a field of study that loosely knits together subfields related to the topics of connectionism, social behaviour and emergence. It is often closely related to the field of artificial intelligence, as many of its pursuits can be linked to machine learning. It relies heavily on the fields of biology, computer science and mathematics. Briefly put, it is the use of computers to model the living phenomena, and simultaneously the study of life to improve the usage of computers. Biologically inspired computing is a major subset of natural computation.

Peter James Denning is an American computer scientist and writer. He is best known for pioneering work in virtual memory, especially for inventing the working-set model for program behavior, which addressed thrashing in operating systems and became the reference standard for all memory management policies. He is also known for his works on principles of operating systems, operational analysis of queueing network systems, design and implementation of CSNET, the ACM digital library, codifying the great principles of computing, and most recently for the book The Innovator's Way, on innovation as a set of learnable practices.

Computational science is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary field that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems. It is an area of science which spans many disciplines, but at its core it involves the development of models and simulations to understand natural systems.

The Bachelor of Computer Science or Bachelor of Science in Computer Science is a type of bachelor's degree, usually awarded after three or four years of collegiate study in computer science, but possibly awarded in fewer years depending on factors such as an institution's course requirements and academic calendar. In some cases it can be awarded in five years. In general, computer science degree programs emphasize the mathematical and theoretical foundations of computing.

The following outline is provided as a topical overview of science:

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to computing:

Most of the terms listed in Wikipedia glossaries are already defined and explained within Wikipedia itself. However, glossaries like this one are useful for looking up, comparing and reviewing large numbers of terms together. You can help enhance this page by adding new terms or writing definitions for existing ones.

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Overview
• Tucker, Allen B. (2004). Computer Science Handbook (2nd ed.). Chapman and Hall/CRC. ISBN   978-1-58488-360-9.
• "Within more than 70 chapters, every one new or significantly revised, one can find any kind of information and references about computer science one can imagine. […] all in all, there is absolute nothing about Computer Science that can not be found in the 2.5 kilogram-encyclopaedia with its 110 survey articles […]." (Christoph Meinel, Zentralblatt MATH )
• van Leeuwen, Jan (1994). Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science. The MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-72020-5.
• "[…] this set is the most unique and possibly the most useful to the [theoretical computer science] community, in support both of teaching and research […]. The books can be used by anyone wanting simply to gain an understanding of one of these areas, or by someone desiring to be in research in a topic, or by instructors wishing to find timely information on a subject they are teaching outside their major areas of expertise." (Rocky Ross, SIGACT News )
• Ralston, Anthony; Reilly, Edwin D.; Hemmendinger, David (2000). Encyclopedia of Computer Science (4th ed.). Grove's Dictionaries. ISBN   978-1-56159-248-7.
• "Since 1976, this has been the definitive reference work on computer, computing, and computer science. […] Alphabetically arranged and classified into broad subject areas, the entries cover hardware, computer systems, information and data, software, the mathematics of computing, theory of computation, methodologies, applications, and computing milieu. The editors have done a commendable job of blending historical perspective and practical reference information. The encyclopedia remains essential for most public and academic library reference collections." (Joe Accardin, Northeastern Illinois Univ., Chicago)
• Edwin D. Reilly (2003). Milestones in Computer Science and Information Technology. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN   978-1-57356-521-9.
Selected literature
Articles
Curriculum and classification