A lovely theory, and yet the field is called "computer science".

Also, while I am not an expert, I suspect it is frequently useful to understand how telescopes actually work when you're trying to do astronomy with them.

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calebkaiser an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The history of the term is actually really interesting. There has been debate about whether or not its the correct name basically since the advent of computer science departments in the 60s.

I don't think the author is "wrong" about the gap between theoretical discussions computation and the actual design constraints of building usable computers. I don't know if that's really a general refutation of proving new things mathematically though. The word "computer" doesn't appear once in the paper OpenAI released, nor do they make any claims specifically about "computer science": https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/preprints/An-explic...

It's a novel bit of math. Whether or not it means anything in the context of writing software realistically is an interesting conversation, but it doesn't have much bearing on the substance of the result itself. OpenAI is pretty explicit that they view these as research results in the domain of mathematics.

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jltsiren 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The field has a lot of names. Computer science is the most common, but you can also find other names such as computing, informatics, datalogy, and data processing science (or their foreign equivalents).

Within computer science, there is a clear mathematical tradition, an engineering tradition, and a social science tradition. There are also plenty of applied computer scientists who use computer science to study topics in other fields.

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heddhunter an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

yes and I'd like to sue whoever named that field for false advertising. when I went to school (Precambrian era - no internet) I thought computer science would be great because I wanted to learn how to program. I dropped it after the 2nd year when I realized it was more about calculus than programming. (and I sucked at calculus. well, the teachers who were supposed to teach me about calculus sucked, but the end result was the same.)

	▲	globular-toast an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It is a misnomer because it's not really about computers, nor is it science (although machine learning has always been much more scientific IMO). But it is about programming. It's just from first principles. It's like learning to build furniture: you first have to learn about wood. Sure, most people will just put something together from IKEA, and that might be satisfying. But they don't really know how to build furniture.