Wikipedia defines theoretical computer science (TCS) as “a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the abstract mathematical foundations of computation.” I will take issue with this definition.
I believe that thinking of TCS as a branch of mathematics is harmful to the discipline. The centrality of computing stems from the fact that it is a technology that has been changing the world for the past 80 years. As computer scientists, we should look for inspiration from physics rather than from mathematics. Theoretical physics is highly mathematical, but it aims to explain and predict the real world. Theories that fail at this “explain/predict” task would ultimately be discarded. Analogously, I will argue that the role of TCS is to explain/predict real-life computing. We should remember the warning of John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians and computer scientists of the 20th century, regarding the danger of mathematics driven solely by internal esthetics: “There is a grave danger that the subject will develop along the line of least resistance.”
I will use Boolean reasoning as the running example to illustrate this thesis.
Bio: Moshe Y. Vardi is University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University. His research focuses on the interface of mathematical logic and computation -- including database theory, hardware/software design and verification, multi-agent systems, and constraint satisfaction. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the ACM SIGACT Goedel Prize, the ACM Kanellakis Award, the ACM SIGMOD Codd Award, the Knuth Prize, the IEEE Computer Society Goode Award, and the EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. He is the author and co-author of over 800 papers, as well as two books. He is a Guggenheim Fellow as well as fellow of several societies, and a member of several academies, including the US National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the Royal Society of London. He holds ten honorary titles. He is a Senior Editor of the Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing.
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