Text 1. Computer and computer science

Unit 4

Check your comprehension

~ Knowledge of which subjects is crucial for engineers in different fields?

~ Who was the earliest civil engineer?

(http://www.articlesbase.com/careers-articles/a-brief-history-of-engineering-355572.html)

Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems. It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information.

The early foundations of what would become computer science predate the invention of the modern digital computer. The first use of the word “computer” was recorded in 1613, referring to a person who carried out calculations, or computations, and the word continued to be used in that sense until the middle of the 20^th century. From the end of the 19^th century onwards though, the word began to take on its more familiar meaning, describing a machine that carries out computations. During the 1940s, as newer and more powerful computing machines were developed, the term computer came to refer to the machines rather than their human predecessors. 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.

Computer science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s. The focus of computer science is more on understanding the properties of the programs used to implement software such as games and web-browsers, and using that understanding to create new programs or improve existing ones. 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.

There are 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, software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer networking and communication, database systems, parallel computation, distributed computation, computer-human interaction, computer graphics, operating systems, and numerical and symbolic computation are important areas of computer science.

Despite its short history as a formal academic discipline, computer science has made a number of fundamental contributions to science and society. These include:

• The start of the “digital revolution,” which includes the current Information Age and the Internet.
• A formal definition of computation and computability, and proof that there are computationally unsolvable and intractable problems.
• The concept of a programming language, a tool for the precise expression of methodological information at various levels of abstraction.
• Scientific computing enabled advanced study of the mind, and mapping of the human genome became possible with the Human Genome Project.
• Algorithmic trading has increased the efficiency and liquidity of financial markets by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other statistical and numerical techniques on a large scale.

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