Distinguished Lecture Series: And Logic Begat Computer Science: When Giants Roamed the Earth
- LecturerProf. Moshe Vardi (Director, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology Institute, Rice University)
Host: Miss Peichi Wang - Time2011-03-08 (Tue.) 10:00 ~ 12:00
- LocationAuditorium 106 at new IIS Building
Abstract
During the past fifty 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.