Computer Science Advantages

As a computer scientist, there’s nothing that annoys me more than when my friends ask me for help setting up their wireless internet, or when my mom calls and asks why her laptop keeps freezing. I try to tell them that I’m not studying computer repairs or computer usage, I’m studying computer science.

But that doesn’t help, because nobody seems to know exactly what the term “computer science” means. When I urge my friends to take a computer science course, they shrug me off with comments like “I’m no good with computers” or “I don’t do science.” Assuming my friends aren’t just unadventurous, there must be some big misconceptions outside of the computer science community about what computer science is all about.

Computer scientists are concerned

We can only analyze procedures within the realm of abstraction in which we have created them. Luckily, this type of reasoning is exactly why we have mathematical logic. Mathematicians, too, are concerned with the idea of truth in the abstract. Instead of running experiments, computer scientists define problems and procedures mathematically, and then analyze them using logic. This is the fundamental reason why computer science is not a science.

Given that the correctness of procedures is proved using mathematical logic, it might seem like computer science is really just a branch of mathematics, which it is, in some sense. In fact, much of the “math” we learn in school is actually computation.

Consider, for example, the problem of dividing two numbers. When presented with this problem, a mathematician might derive the properties of division, such as when there will be a remainder. A computer scientist, in contrast, would focus on figuring out how to perform the

But I think the breadth of study within computer science is not necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t need to be strictly defined.

Within the computer science department at my university, there’s a huge variety of interests among the students and professors. The multitude of perspectives complement each other, and help the field grow.

In the end, its the rate of growth of the field that makes all this definition business so tricky. Computer science is still young, and always undergoing new growth spurts. It’s that awkward teenage boy at the school dance whose limbs are growing so fast that he can’t make them all move together harmoniously just yet.

For now, I’m content to just think back to when I was an awkward teenager trying to figure out exactly who I was and how to express that identity to the rest of the world. I grew up and figured it out, and we computer scientists will eventually figure out our communal identity too.

Of course, this sort of justification relies on the assumption that the natural world will continue to behave the same way as it has before, but that is a topic for another