Computing Science Quotes & Sayings

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct. — Donald Ervin Knuth

What's needed now are software technologies that interconnect computing systems, people and data to produce more rapid answers to the questions of science, and to help researchers use computation in the most effective manner. — Bob Muglia

I occasionally find myself debating with computer science colleagues whether work on the more applied side can form the basis for good academic computing research. In my view, it clearly can, as long as it yields something sufficiently novel and important concerning computing. — Paul S. Rosenbloom

Access to supercomputers. The science is well ahead of our ability to implement it. It's quite clear that if we could run our models at a higher resolution we could do a much better job-tomorrow-in terms of our seasonal and decadal predictions. It's so frustrating. We keep saying we need four times the computing power. We're talking just 10 or 20 million a year-dollars or pounds-which is tiny compared to the damage done by disasters. Yet it's a difficult argument to win. — Julia Slingo

I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. — Alan Perlis

These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest. — Samuel Johnson

It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.] — William Shockley

At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later. — Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their pocket, would they have believed it? Now we have phones that have more computing power than was used to send some of the first rockets into space. We have electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure diseases that only fifty years ago was fatal. and the rate of change is increasing. Today we are able to do what your parents would of dismissed as impossible and your grandparents nothing short of magical. — Nicolas Flamel

sustained exponential improvement in most aspects of computing, extraordinarily large amounts of digitized information, and recombinant innovation. These three forces are yielding breakthroughs that convert science fiction into everyday reality, — Anonymous

Neoclassical economics has effectively insulated itself from the great advances made in science and engineering over the last 40 years. This self-imposed isolation must come to an end. For while the concepts of neoclassical economics appear difficult, they are actually quaint in comparison to the sophistication evident in today's mathematics, engineering, computing, evolutionary biology and physics. In order to advance, economics must humbly submit to learning from disciplines that it has studiously ignored for so long. Some researchers in outside fields have called for the wholesale replacement of standard economics curricula, using at least the building blocks of modern thought inherent in other disciplines. — Steve Keen

Spurred on by both the science and science fiction of our time, my generation of researchers and engineers grew up to ask what if? and what's next? We went on to pursue new disciplines like computer vision, artificial intelligence, real-time speech translation, machine learning, and quantum computing. — Elizabeth Bear

Women tended to be more docile and patient, so went the belief, and could be depended upon more than men to check and recheck the accuracy of their calculations. A typical picture of the Galton Biometrical Laboratory under Karl Pearson would have Pearson and several men walking around, looking at output from the computers or discussing deep mathematical ideas, while all about them rows of women were computing. — David Salsburg