Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Engineering is a very old discipline, and may be defined as the application of science and mathematics to the solution of practical problems arising in the design and manufacture of complex artifacts. Prior to the eighteenth century, engineering was largely confined to the military domain. Typical engineering concerns included the accurate firing of artillery, contriving means to aid in troop movement over difficult terrain, and so on. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, non-military engineering began to be recognized in its own right, and came to be called civil engineering. Subsequent centuries have given rise to many further sub-disciplines in engineering; recently we have seen software engineering and genetic engineering, among others, come to prominence.
Electrical engineering arose toward the end of the 19th century thanks to the work of such pioneers as Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla. These men developed means by which electricity could be efficiently produced, distributed, and used. In its early days, electrical engineering was concerned almost entirely with what would now be called power engineering--the design and construction of devices that use or convert substantial amounts of power in useful ways, such as such as electrical motors, generators, and transformers. The surge in industrial production in the early twentieth century in the developed nations and those nations' subsequent rise to levels of prosperity higher than in previous centuries is in large measure directly attributable to the fruits of classical electrical engineering.
The next important step was the development of electronics, meaning primarily the vacuum tube and, later on, the transistor. Electronics made possible entirely new technologies such as wireless communication. Even before transistors were available, it was realized that electronic devices could be used to construct a computing device that was substantially faster and better than the mechanical adding machines, typewriters, and other information-handling machines of the day. Electronics made it possible to create practical computing devices that applied the already-existing ideas of computer science pioneers such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann.
Computer science as a distinct academic discipline began to be recognized in the 1960s. Traditionally, computer science departments in colleges and universities all over the world have grown in one of two ways--as extensions or outgrowths either of mathematics departments or of electrical engineering departments. In many cases, a complete separation has never been achieved, and departments devoted to "mathematics and computer science," or "electrical engineering and computer science" are commonplace. Depending upon whether a computer science department is more closely allied with mathematics or with electrical engineering, there is often a difference in the perspective taken by its faculty in their study and research. Departments closer to mathematics often study theoretical computer science--discrete mathematics, algorithms, and so on--while those closer to electrical engineering often specialize in computer engineering, hardware, architecture, and the like. Obviously, these are general trends and not hard-and-fast rules.
Electrical engineering has long since ceased to consist solely of power engineering, and students of the subject today, unlike their peers of a few generations ago, do not usually spend a great deal of time studying electrical motors, transformers, and suchlike devices. Electrical engineering today is more concerned with the building integrated circuits or with telecommunications (the transfer of large quantities of data over long distances in the most efficient manner possible). It is also concerned with computer engineering, that is, with computer architecture and the construction of actual computing devices.
It is not uncommon for the names of departments or the diplomas offered by them to refer to "Electrical and Computer Engineering." Computer engineering, in this sense, may be distinguished from computer science to the extent that it is intensely practical in its orientation, while a problem in computer science may as yet have no immediate application, or may be phrased in abstract mathematical terms.
The study of computer science, especially at the graduate level, has had a tradition of generously accepting students from other disciplines--more so, perhaps, than is the case with other physical or natural sciences. This is in part because in the early days of computer science there were no undergraduate programs in the subject, so a graduate student had to have studied something else before studying computer science. A great many noted computer scientists thus do not have doctorates in computer science because such doctorates weren't available when they were in school. The most common background subjects for computer scientists other than computer science proper are electrical engineering and mathematics.
As with mathematics, computer science is both a user of the results of electrical engineering and a supplier of its wants. In fact, there is a classic feedback loop between the two areas. That is, electrical engineers build real computers guided by the insights of computer scientists; meanwhile, computer scientists need the real computers built by electrical engineers, and by advancing help provide the insights required for electrical (and other) engineers to build improved computers and other devices.
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