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Comment by NikolaeVarius | Hacker News Reader

Famously, computer science isn't a science, nor is it about computers.

I guess not a physical science (although there was some crossover last year between some results in quantum computing and physics, there's probably lots other examples that I'm not familiar with too) [1] but it fits squarely in the formal sciences (which includes math, logic, etc). And it doesn't concern any particular physical computer, but it does have topics on what an idealized/ theoretical computer could do haha

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro...

computer science is applied math, and software engineering is applied philosophy

Following that reasoning, wouldn't any type of engineering be applied philosophy?

Hence doctors of philosophy.

If what you’re doing isn’t research it isn’t technically philosophy. The more applied a field is, the less philosophical it is, because a general “way” of doing things has been established. That’s why you can have an entire undergraduate about “solved problems”, and only after that do you start advancing the field by tackling unsolved problems.

Philosophy of Computer Science [pdf] ( https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/phics.pdf )

And the HN post about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20912718

There more than a few thoughts in there about what computer science is and isn't.

Is math a science? My CS education was largely math classes. Algorithms are definitely math.

I would say no. STEM is science, technology, engineering, math. compsci is a math degree.

Maybe math is a tool/framework used by scientists? Physics is another example that is largely math.

Math is both a philosophical enquiry (pure math) and a tool (applied math & statistics).

Physics as a science uses math as a modelling and analysis tool.

I've always parsed mathematics more as a language than a science, because it's not necessarily empirical.

Perhaps as a language combined with rules to operate upon that language, transforming true statements into other true statements.

Physics : Engineering :: Computer Science : Software Engineering

Pursuing this question is quite the rabbit hole, but doing research in mathematics makes me believe that math is a science: you have questions, you collect evidence by exploring examples (i.e., conducting experiments), and you formulate hypotheses as conjectures. If you're lucky, your conjectures are correct and you prove them! Proofs are even better than the accumulated evidence on which theories in other sciences depend, in that proven theorems are immune to falsifiability within the axiomatic system in use.

What would be a better term for it? Maybe "the mathematics of computation"?

Some UK institutions (including some pretty respected ones) adopted the term "School of Informatics" and confer Informatics degrees instead of using the term Computer Science.

I suspect the university marketing teams will eventually change this to Computer Science much like "Natural Philosophy" evolved into "Physics" at many places though...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics

https://www.ed.ac.uk/informatics

KCL was Informatics and it was broadly classed w/ maths/'natural sciences' when I was there 10 years ago - according to a younger colleague they have since rebranded to CS.

In the UK, the A level I took was called "Computing". My university called it that as well and treated it as an MEng rather than an MSc, but most UK universities still call it Computer Science I think.

Algorithmic Engineers? CS is essentially the study of automatic algorithmic processes that scale, so something along those lines.

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