Computer Science

Program Overview

Despite the name, Computer Science is not really a science of computers at all. Computers are quite remarkable electronic devices, but even more remarkable is what they can be made to do: simulate the flow of air over a wing, manage communication over the Internet, control the actions of a robot, synthesize realistic images, play grandmaster-level chess, learn how to automatically translate between languages, and on and on. Indeed, the application of computers in activities like these has affected most areas of modern life. What these tasks have in common has little to do with the physics or electronics of computers; what matters is that they can be formulated as some sort of computation. This is the real subject matter of Computer Science: computation, and what can or cannot be done computationally. In trying to make sense of what we can get a computer to do, a wide variety of topics come up. There are two recurring themes: the issue of scale (how big a system can we specify without getting lost in the design, or how big a task can a computer handle within reasonable bounds of time, memory, and accuracy) and the scope of computation (how far computational ideas can be applied).

Academic Requirements