Perspective of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Today, I discovered a great talk by Richard Feynman. It was about the different thinking processes of mathematicians and physicists. I encourage everyone who is interesting in physics, math, science or engineering, to check it out. In this post, I will give my take on the different thinking of computer science and electrical engineering.

Electrical engineering, is a discipline that grew out of physics. It uses models from physics to build useful systems. Like physics, electrical engineering is highly bound to the reality and sometimes it borrows tools from mathematics to engineer a better system or solve a problem. Unlike physics, we don’t go crazy on coming up with new reality or interpretations of the world. That job is left to physicists.

Computer Science is a relative new discipline. Computer science is similar to mathematics; it deals with abstract thinking. Mathematics builds on top of axioms; computer science builds on top of basic “instruction sets” and rules. These “instruction sets” and rules enable we go from A to B. If one is good at mathematics, namely, doing algebra and symbol manipulation, one should be able to become a good computer scientists, because the thinking process of the two are similar. In fact, some sub-fields of mathematics is directly related to computer science, for example combinatorics, which deals problems from counting elements.

Like all disciplines, they all influence each others. One borrows ideas from another. For example, artificial intelligent, which is a sub-field of computer science, has been influence a lot by statistics and math. Methods likes deep learning are essentially doing optimization on a objective function in a computationally tractable way.