1.1 What is Computer Science?

You might be uncertain about what computer science (CS) is, but you use it every day. When you use Google or your smartphone, or watch a movie with special effects, there’s lots of CS in there. When you order a product over the Internet, there is CS in the web site, in the cryptography used to keep your credit card number secure, and in the way that FedEx routes their delivery vehicle to get your order to you as quickly as possible. Nonetheless, even computer scientists can struggle to answer the question “What exactly is CS?”

Many other sciences try to understand how things work: physics tries to understand the physical world, chemistry tries to understand the composition of matter, and biology tries to understand life. So what is computer science trying to understand? Computers? Probably not: computers are designed and built by humans, so their inner workings are known (at least to some people!).

Perhaps it’s all about programming. Programming is indeed important to a computer scientist, just as grammar is important to a writer or a telescope is important to an astronomer. But nobody would argue that writing is about grammar or that astronomy is about telescopes. Similarly, programming is an important piece of computer science but it’s not what CS is all about.

If we turn to origins, computer science has roots in disparate fields that include engineering, mathematics, and cognitive science, among others. Some computer scientists design things, much like engineers. Others seek new ways to solve computational problems, analyze their solutions, and prove that they are correct, much like mathematicians. Still others think about how humans interact with computers and software, which is closely related to cognitive science and psychology. All of these pieces are a part of computer science.

One theme that unifies (nearly) all computer scientists is that they are interested in the automation of tasks ranging from artificial intelligence to zoogenesis. Put another way, computer scientists are interested in finding solutions for a wide variety of computational problems. They analyze those solutions to determine their “goodness,” and they implement the good solutions to create useful software for people to work with. This diversity of endeavors is, in part, what makes CS so much fun.

There are several important concepts at the heart of computer science; we have chosen to emphasize six of them: data, problem solving, algorithms, programming, abstraction, and creativity.

Zoogenesis refers to the origin of a particular animals species. Computational biology is a field that uses CS to help solve zoogenetic questions, among many others.

Source: CS for All — cs5book 1 documentation