Want to be a computer scientist? Forget maths
A new book seeks to demolish the concept that computer science is rooted in mathematics and, in particular that the notion of the algorithm is fundamental to computer science.
In particular, he says the notion of the algorithm, "has been largely ineffective as a paradigm for computer science." Fant argues that, because mathematicians, notably John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, were intimately involved with the early development of digital electronic computers in the 1940s they transplanted a mathematical model of computation, including the algorithm - commonly understood to be an exact prescription, defining a computational process, leading from various initial data to the desired result - into the fledgling science of computers.
He claims that "What is essentially a discipline of pure mathematics has come to be called "the theory of computer science," and "the notion of the algorithm has been decreed to be a fundamental paradigm of computer science" However, he says this mathematical perspective "is the wrong point of view" and is asking the wrong questions.
