Greetings!
This will be the blog for the Freshman Seminar "What is Computing" aka int94th at UCSB, Fall 2016.

But isn't computing about crunching numbers? Big numbers? Lots of numbers? Is this not really doing arithmetic fast?  Really fast? Or is it cellphones? Airline reservations? Guiding rockets? Financial transactions? Video games? How about "...listen carefully for our menu has recently changed.."? Writing long "codes" perhaps? Weather prediction? Solving the Rubik's cube? Digital photography? The Internet? Or are all of these engineering aspects of a very central human endeavor? The answer is THEY ARE ... but how can we define Computing and make the definition precise, palatable and useful at the same time?

We will talk about what Computing is, and argue that it is a basic constant of the world-universe-cosmos, like the chemical elements and the integers (OK, even this is arguable!). It is a way of thinking, and a way of "measuring" difficulty of the decisions we make, the way we organize objects and quantify the behavior of things around us. But there is more...

The students will be required to think about each lecture/discussion (there are 10 of these), summarize it in a paragraph, come up with a novel question about the topic, and send these to me.

-OE