Friday, June 08, 2007

What to learn from scientific/technical education

To quote George Forsythe,

"The most valuable acquisition in a scientific or technical education are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a lifetime. I rate natural language and mathematics as the most important of these tools, and computer science as a third"


From the article, "What to do till the Computer Scientist comes", American Mathematical Monthly 75 (1968), 454-462

Source: "Selected papers on computer science - Donald Knuth"

I always believed that, if we teach a language and mathematics to students, then its as good as teaching him/her all other subjects. I was happy to see that there are other people in the world who also hold that opinion.

More info on this article may be got at
http://infolab.stanford.edu/TR/CS-TR-67-77.html

The complete article may be downloaded from
ftp://reports.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/67/77/CS-TR-67-77.pdf

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