The 2009 Milner Lecture
And Logic Begat Computer Science: When Giants Roamed the Earth
Rice University
4.00 p.m.on 1 June 2009
G07
The Informatics Forum
10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh
and afterwards in the Forum Atrium for a reception
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.
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