An update from computer science land
Since the beginning of last week, I’ve been busy teaching my advisor’s class on computational complexity. Complexity theory isn’t really my area of research, but it’s definitely one of the reasons I became a computer science major. When the class is over I plan on blogging about some of the topics. People seem to have the mistaken impression that computer science is all about computers, and I’d like to do more to help dispel that myth.
I took a bunch of programming classes in high school, but when I got to Brown, I decided to avoid computer science. I had liked learning about algorithms, the fastest ways to solve problems, how computers worked, but I hadn’t always liked the personality of my fellow students. Basically, a lot of them were big nerds, and I could never get behind their enthusiasm for mastering Linux commands.
As a freshman at Brown, I took a logic class where I learned that certain easy to state problems are uncomputable, meaning no systematic set of instructions can be used to solve them. More importantly, I learned that many people study the science of computation without actually writing programmings. The next year I decided to give computer science another shot, and one of my TAs (my buddy Kevin) invited me to join his group independent study project on computational complexity. After that, I was sold.