These people are famous computer scientists:

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955),[1] also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

Lamport was the winner of the 2013 Turing Award for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport

His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, and distributed computing. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science. He also received the 2023 Turing Award for his contributions to the understanding of randomness in the theory of computation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Wigderson

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”, together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for their foundational work on deep learning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshua_Bengio

Virginia Vassilevska Williams (née Virginia Panayotova Vassilevska)[1] is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms.

She is notable for her breakthrough results in fast matrix multiplication, for her work on dynamic algorithms, and for helping to develop the field of fine-grained complexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Vassilevska_Williams

What sorcery is this? 🤔🤔🤔

Take for instance this dude:

Richard Ryan Williams, known as Ryan Williams (born 1979), is an American theoretical computer scientist working in computational complexity theory and algorithms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Williams_(computer_scientist)

Wait…WHAT?

What the hell does a “computer scientist” actually do?

This question sounds simple. But the answer is not simple at all. Please explain. Thanks.

  • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@slrpnk.net
    17·
    10 hours ago

    We’re very specialized kinds of mathematicians, sometimes. In other languages the term is often “Information Science” and in German, IIRC, it’s “Infomathics”, both arguably better names.

    Theoretical Computer Scientists write mathematical proofs showing the limits of how information can be stored, transmitted, permuted, hidden, and extracted. Practicing Computer Scientist learn the current best ways to do the above and write implementations thereof. Examples:

    Storage: Compression algorithms like zip files, jpeg, mp3

    Transmitted: protocols like FTP, HTTP, and yes, ActivityPub

    Permuted: A lot of sound editing is done by turning an array of of pitches over time into an array of frequencies over time, changing those frequencies, then turning them back.

    Hidden: Encryption, obviously, but also steganography

    Extracted: Decryption, obviously, but also natural speech processing and image recognition