[ih] PhD

[Joseph Touch]

> On Jan 3, 2021, at 11:58 AM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 1/3/21 10:12 AM, Joseph Touch via Internet-history wrote:
>> It’s less common as a field matures, 
> I think this observation is key -- "Computer Science" is far from being
> mature.  IMHO, it's still somewhere in the spectrum between Art and
> Engineering.  

The way universities have devolved to teaching it, I agree.

It’s sad that one can get an undergrad major in CS without actually being exposed to automata theory, complexity, algorithms, data structures, etc.

But I guess Java and Python pay increasing tuition costs more effectively.

...
> I've asked the question before, but never gotten any answers -- after
> 50+ years of Computer Science, what are the top few most important
> Scientific Principles that have been discovered - analogous to Maxwell's
> Equations, or Einstein's, etc? 

See above, when it’s actually taught.

> Same question for the subfield of Computer Networking.

The way it’s often taught there are very few ‘principles’; it’s too often an exercise in comparative anatomy or archeology (here’s what others built; let’s study it).

I did develop a first-principles approach that extrapolated Shannon’s info theory into networking, focusing on WHY rather than merely HOW. It was taught for several years at USC and by others at UCLA and elsewhere. It’s in development as a book, though spare time for such unsung work is hard to come by…

Joe