Thursday, January 30, 4:15pm, TBA
 
Moshe Y. Vardi  
(Rice University)
 
"And Logic Begat Computer Science: When Giants Roamed The Earth"
 
During the past thirty years there has been extensive,
continuous, and growing interaction between logic and computer science. In
fact, logic has been called "the calculus of computer science". The
argument is that logic plays a fundamental role in computer science,
similar to that played by calculus in the physical sciences and
traditional engineering disciplines. Indeed, logic plays an important role
in areas of computer science as disparate as architecture (logic gates),
software engineering (specification and verification), programming
languages (semantics, logic programming), databases (relational algebra
and SQL), artificial intelligence (automated theorem proving), algorithms
(complexity and expressiveness), and theory of computation (general
notions of computability). This non-technical talk will provide an
overview of the unusual effectiveness of logic in computer science by
surveying the history of logic in computer science, going back all the way
to Aristotle and Euclid, and showing how logic actually gave rise to
computer science.
 
The Colloquium is supported by generous
contributions from the CUNY Faculty Development Program, Bloomberg,
Information Builders, Inc., and Royal Philips Electronics.
 
 
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