Electr* Engineering

[Lee Courtney]

in the late 1960s and up thru 1979 UTexas at Arlington Computer Science
initially only offered a Masters, and was housed in Industrial Engineering.
If you wanted an undergrad degree in "computing" you went thru the math
department and got a BA or BS in mathematics with an emphasis in computing.
I took a *lot* of CS classes and a couple EE tclasses to build my own CS
curriculum on top of my BS-Math.

In 1979 when I graduated I could have gotten one of the first BS in
Computer Science and Engineering instead of Math. But, I just stoop to
taking a 3-unit class for a semester in mechanical drawing which was
madnatory for engineering degrees at that time. Has never been a problem,
and I enjoyed my math classes.

Lee Courtney

Lee Courtney

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 12:04 PM Yeechang Lee via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Adam Thornton <athornton at gmail.com> says:
> > The genealogy of Computer Science departments (and their curricula)
> > (at least in the US) is also weird and historically-contingent.
> > Basically it seems to have been a tossup at any given school whether
> > it came out of the Electr[ical|onic] Engineering department, in
> > which case it was memories and logic gates and a bottom-up,
> > hardware-focused curriculum, or out of the Mathematics department,
> > in which case it was algorithms and complexity analysis and a
> > software-focused curriculum.
>
> Yes, I've noticed the same thing. Example: Harvard's CS department is
> originally from the math side, while MIT's is from EE (thus today's
> EECS).
>
> Berkeley = EE
> Brown = Math
> BYU = Math
> Caltech = EE
> Columbia = EE
> Cornell = Operations research, math
> Dartmouth = Math
> Illinois = Math
> NYU = Both (because Polytechnic developed its own CS program long
> before NYU acquired it to regain an engineering school)
> Penn = EE
> UCLA = OR (probably because of the RAND heritage)
>
> Caltech until very recently did not formally offer CS degrees;
> students received degrees in Engineering and Applied Science, with a
> focus on CS (or aeronautics, or civil, or ME).
>
> Illinois is an example of a track we might call "other" or even
> "defense". With government funding the university built its own
> computers (including ILLIAC and PLATO), and the group that did so
> became the CS department, but the undergraduate CS program began
> within the math department. Harvard's and Penn's programs might also
> qualify.
>
> Undergraduate CS degrees are BA (Example: Harvard), BS (Example:
> Penn), or both (Example: Columbia). At Penn one must be an engineering
> student to major in CS. At Columbia one can major in CS in either the
> liberal arts or engineering schools, but with different
> curriculums. At Yale there is one undergraduate school, within which
> one can receive a BA or BS in CS, with different curriculums. Cornell,
> Northwestern, and Berkeley offer CS in their separate liberal arts and
> engineering schools; undergraduates receive BA or BS degrees with
> identical CS curriculums, with only other requirements differing.
>
> I've read that medical schools are good at teaching either
> pharmacology (drugs), or pathology (diseases); perhaps this is also
> because of the expertise/specialty of their early faculty members.
>
> --
> geo:37.783333,-122.416667
>


-- 
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell