What is Computer Science?

Those who are curious about computers may want to explore the theoretical underpinnings of these devices which we use every day.  A course in computer science will span everything from programming to the development of algorithms to problems which are still unsolvable by computers.

Computer science began in the 1940s and was heavily connected with the war efforts to crack codes of enemy forces.  Because there were so many codes to go through, a systemized procedure had to be devised, which would recursively check each code and try to break it.  This shows a fundamental aspect of computer science, which is to take a task and recursively apply an algorithm to it, until the task is solved.  Although computers were first programmed using punch cards that were manually fed into a machine, computer programmers have now graduated to a higher level of abstraction and program machines with words, instead of punched out dots in long index cards.

Within computer science, there are many different areas of specialization.  Someone who is interested in computer science can focus on computational complexity, comparability problems or computer graphics.  Computer science is heavily connected to certain industries, and a person with a computer science degree can find employment in many different technically inclined and engineering related fields.  For example, an applied econometrics degree with an emphasis in applied mathematics and computer science is helpful for anyone who needs to forecast economic events and other globally trending phenomena.  Mathematics and computer science have always been allied fields, and the first computer science departments in this country started out as sub departments of university mathematics departments.