Ultimately we have to ask ourselves if it was overall a good thing that computer science as a discipline ceased to be part of mathematics — rather than broadening the horizons of mathematics and bridging the gap between mathematics and social science. I am not speaking purely rhetorically, as there are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides.
@antoinechambertloir Can you elaborate? My understanding was that at a certain point, it became clear that computer science — if unshackled from mathematics departments — could (like other engineering and laboratory sciences) attract more money than mathematicians had ever seen... This was true, and the rest was history.
@antoinechambertloir@jonmsterling
Can't resist this immortal Girard quote:
"Theoretical Computing is not yet a science. Many basic concepts have not been clarified, and current work in the area obeys a kind of “wedding cake” paradigm: for instance language design is reminiscent of Ptolomeic astronomy — forever in need of further corrections. There are, however, some limited topics such as complexity theory and denotational semantics which are relatively free from this criticism.
In such a situation, methodological remarks are extremely important, since we have to see methodology as strategy and concrete results as of a tactical nature."
@boarders@antoinechambertloir@jonmsterling Just yesterday I was pondering his remark that “The establishment of a truly operational semantics of algorithms is perhaps the most important problem in computer science.”
@boarders@antoinechambertloir@jonmsterling My view is that you shouldn't hire too many mathematicians in a CS department since everything grinds to a halt and nothing real is done anymore.
@sprout@antoinechambertloir@jonmsterling I can’t say it looks from the outside like computer science is drowning in mathematicians or mathematical input. More generally, no field has ever done well out of limiting its mathematical analysis. Einstein famously came to accept this fact as a result of Weyl, and it led to our best formulation of general relativity as being about free particles following geodesics on a Lorentzian manifold which we could now teach to undergrads if we had professors that weren’t scared of mathematics
@boarders@antoinechambertloir@jonmsterling In contrast I think too many mathematicians are hired since they're relatively cheap, they require only paper and pencil, and people expect grandiose results from fundamental research.
I'ld rather invest in people with the aptitude to actually create stuff. Sometimes that's a mathematician but it's rare.
@sprout@antoinechambertloir@jonmsterling John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Alonzo Church - three mathematicians - created computer science, maybe cool it a little on who is worthy
@boarders@antoinechambertloir@jonmsterling Math and Science are fundamentally different. In Math you can prove things. Science is the opposite, you can only disprove things, like, water cannot be ignited with matches. You could try to prove that mathematically if you would like to
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