A Celebration of Computer Sciences at Harvard

A Celebration of Computer Sciences at Harvard and in honor of the 70th birthday of Harry Lewis It is not generally known that the first digital computer in the world was built atHarvard under Professor Howard Aiken in the 1940s, the Mark I, to compute ballistictables during WWII. The computer was electromechanical since electronics weretoo expansive and unreliable at that time (you can find permanent exhibit of Mark I at the Smithsonian in Washington DC and at the Science Center of Harvard). In the early 50s, almost anybody who contributed to computer science studied under Aiken at the Computation laboratory that bear his name. Then in the70s came the legendary computer science teacher and education leader, ProfessorHarry Lewis. I myself spent three years in the CompLab before drifting into thesystem control field. It is thus fitting that I attend the above celebration on April 19, 2017.Of course after more than 50 years, except for the honoree, I do not recognize anyone at the conference. All the speakers by tradition are former students of Harry Lewis. They have since then ventured into all kinds of fields of endeavor fromfinance to biology wherever computer science technologies are being used. Excellent speakers they are, I did not feel lost and came away with new appreciation of the subject of computer sciences:

· The conventional wisdom is that if you areinterested in the Humanities but not sure what to study, major in history orLiterature. Similarly you choose Physics if you are not sure about which branchof Engineering you want. Now, Computer Science is the choice if you have anyaptitude for science.

· In modern civilization, we take things like signinga check make an insurance claim a simple straight forward transaction. What we don’toften realize is the vast amount of back stories and organizations involvedwith such a transaction. From the banks, the paper processing, fact checking,to the technologies, the bureaucracies, and the human handling, there areliterally hundreds of steps, machines, and human being involved. In computerscience, the same things and complexities are involved with what we know as the“Server-less CLOUD” which everyone uses.

· Computer language has also undergone tremendousevolution from the 1950s when I was briefly involved. The Backus-Naur Form has become a full blown mathematical-computational language. It can describe the operational of a complex program without a single word except a set of symbols using what is called Metanotations.