What is Computer Science?

Computer science is all about solving problems. Computer scientists seek to understand the nature of problems and search for creative techniques to efficiently automate their solutions. Like the field of medicine, computer science cannot be identified with, nor limited to, a single specialty. From games to artificial brains, from businesses to labs, from networks to databases, and from conceptual tools to hardware, computer scientists devise ways to represent, process, and produce knowledge for every discipline imaginable. Methods include considerations of hardware, software, the theory of computation, and alternative computing strategies.

Computer Science is, therefore,a special window through which to view and understand the world. It allows us to observe our surroundings as a collection of computational mechanisms operating on common underlying principles which can be understood in terms of the encoding, storage, communication, and processing of information.

What do computer scientists do?

There is no way to identify all of the areas with which Computer Scientists are involved, but the list below provides a glimpse of the scope of their activities:

Generating graphics for movies
Controlling artificial limbs
Analyzing the human genome
Supporting autonomous vehicle navigation
Creating navagation software for exploring Mars
Calculating spacecraft trajectories
Developing real-time interactive games
Predicting the weather
Modeling climate change
Computing molecular bindings
Forecasting economic trends
Producing art
Creating humanoid robots
Visualizing the brain

The following table identifies some application areas in computer science: