[ih] PhD

[vinton cerf]

well, at least read Knuth.
v


On Sun, Jan 3, 2021 at 3:45 PM Alex McKenzie via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

>  Jack,
> For networking, I think there are a number of key principles exposed in
> John Day's book " Patterns in Network Architecture"
> For Computer Science, I don't know.
> Cheers,Alex
>
>     On Sunday, January 3, 2021, 2:58:31 PM EST, 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.
>
> When I was in grad school at MIT, I remember asking my advisor about
> investing several more years to get a PhD in the then-new curriculum of
> Computer Science.    His observation was that PhDs tend to produce
> experts in some very narrow specialization, and also provide credentials
> useful for attracting venture capital to found companies.   In contrast,
> MS work tends to create professionals with much broader interests and
> ability to explore outside of their academic focus.   I interpreted
> this: PhDs think and discover scientific principles; MSes build stuff.
>
> Since I was most interested in "building stuff that people actually use"
> (what I told my high school adviser), I took the MS route.   This was
> apparently pretty common at the time (an immature field).  There's an
> interesting summary here of the experience at Harvard, and its ties to
> The Internet:
>
> https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/09/features-a-science-is-born
>
> 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?  Same question for the subfield of
> Computer Networking.
>
> IMHO, we won't have a Science until we know those Principles that tell
> us how to use computers in ways that don't require constant updates to
> fix critical flaws, or enable branches of governments or high school
> script kiddies to engage in cyberwarfare, or subject all of us to spam,
> phishing, viruses, identity theft, and other such nasties of computer
> life today.
>
> There's now over 50 years of operational experience with computers and
> networks.  The "Internet Experiment" continues.   Perhaps some current
> PhD candidates can extract some Scientific Principles from all that
> experimentation and tell the next generation of builders how to make
> things better.
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
>
>
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