yawiki.org entry for Theoretical_computer

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Introduction

puter science|the journal|Theoretical Computer Science (journal)}}Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a division or subset of general computer science and mathematics which focuses on more abstract or mathematical aspects of computing.These divisions and subsets include analysis of algorithms and formal semantics of programming languages. Technically, there are hundreds of divisions and subsets besides these two. Each of the multiple parts have their own individual personal leaders (of popularity) and there are many associations and professional social groups and publications of distinction.

        Introduction
                Scope
                History
                Organizations
                Journals and newsletters
                Conferences
                See also
                Notes
                Further reading

Scope

It is not easy to circumscribe the theory areas precisely and the ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) describes its mission as the promotion of theoretical computer science and notes: To this list, the ACM's journal Transactions on Computation Theory adds coding theory, computational learning theory and theoretical computer science aspects of areas such as databases, information retrieval, economic models and networks. Despite this broad scope, the "theory people" in computer science self-identify as different from the "applied people." Some characterize themselves as doing the "(more fundamental) 'science(s)' underlying the field of computing." Other "theory-applied people" suggest that it is impossible to separate theory and application. This means, the so called "theory people" regularly use experimental science(s) done in less-theoretical areas such as software system research. This also means, there is more cooperation than mutually exclusive competition between theory and application.

History

While formal algorithms have existed for millennia (Euclid's algorithm for determining the greatest common divisor of two numbers is still used in computation), it was not until 1936 that Alan Turing, Alonzo Church and Stephen Kleene formalized the definition of an algorithm in terms of computation. While binary and logical systems of mathematics had existed before 1703, when Gottfried Leibniz formalized logic with binary values for true and false. While logical inference and mathematical proof had existed in ancient times, in 1931 Kurt G�del proved with his incompleteness theorem that there were fundamental limitations on what statements, even if true, could be proved.These developments have led to the modern study of logic and computability, and indeed the field of theoretical computer science as a whole. Information theory was added to the field with a 1948 mathematical theory of communication by Claude Shannon. In the same decade, Donald Hebb introduced a mathematical model of learning in the brain. With mounting biological data supporting this hypothesis with some modification, the fields of neural networks and parallel distributed processing were established.With the development of quantum mechanics in the beginning of the 20th century came the concept that mathematical operations could be performed on an entire particle wavefunction. In other words, one could compute functions on multiple states simultaneously. This led to the concept of a quantum computer in the latter half of the 20th century that took off in the 1990s when Peter Shor showed that such methods could be used to factor large numbers in polynomial time, which, if implemented, would render most modern public key cryptography systems uselessly insecure.Modern theoretical computer science research is based on these basic developments, but includes many other mathematical and interdisciplinary problems that have been posed.