Re: [ontolog-forum] Looking to the Future of Data Science - NYTimes.com

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

Anecdote about my first professor of Computer Science, in Graduate School at U. Penn, Averind Joshi:

I went to him and said : I wrote up some programs in Algol to execute the Turing Machines in the exercises.

He said, standing on his toes, "In the FIRST place, in the PHYSICAL universe, there is not, nor could there ever be, such a thing as a Turing Machine or any other real computer. 

If you want to deal with imprecise, unpredicatable approximations of real computers, take some computer engineering courses."

Of course there is NO physical science legitimately called computer science, any more than there is a 'automotive science'.  This is what I heard Feinman say, and it surely seems obvious.  OTOH, there is a branch of *mathematics* called computer science.  I think this was Ed B's point, and nothing that Feinmann says is even on this point, as far I can see.    The more general issue is that mathematics itself is something entirely different from 'science;.

Wm

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 1:13 PM, Steven Ericsson-Zenith <steven@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 9:03 AM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Feynman was not suggesting that science is more respectable than
engineering, but that their goals are very different.

 

Thank you for highlighting this point John. It is worth noting that my "computer science" doctorate awarded by the Sorbonne is an engineering degree, in French, in "Infomatique." Despite the fact that my thesis investigates generally how processes interact. Something important is lost in the translation from the French "Infomatique" to the English "Computer Science." 

Ed's earlier remarks in some sense speak to the roll of "pure mathematics" and there is a need to build a bridge between pure mathematics and the natural sciences. 

By extension then the notion of "Data Science" is a similar misconception. "Data Engineering" seems perfectly reputable to me.. Of which, I'd suggest schemas and schema mapping (not "ontology", that really must be considered the product of an early misunderstanding)  are an important part. 

Steven

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