Famous Women in CS and PHYS
Known as the world’s first computer programmer. Wrote an algorithm for the Analytical Machine to compute Bernoulli numbers, even though the machine was never completed. A programming language is named after her.
Who is Ada Lovelace
A phenomenon in special relativity in which moving clocks appear to tick more slowly than stationary ones.
What is time dilation
Chair of the Computer Science department. Also loves SWC!
Who is Professor Smirni?
“for every action (force), there is an equal and opposite reaction,” is from what law?
What is Newton’s 3rd Law
In C and C++, this type of behavior occurs when the language standard does not define what should happen, often leading to different results depending on the compiler or environment.
What is undefined behavior?
A NASA mathematician whose complex calculations on orbital mechanics led to the success of the first US crewed space flights in the early 1960s as well as the 1969 moon landing.
Who is Katherine Johnson
This data structure, which operates on a Last In, First Out (LIFO) principle, is used to keep track of function calls in recursion.
What is the call stack?
Who is the main contact for the EPAD concentration?
Who is a Yang, Ran
An entity with data (attributes) and behavior (methods). Created based off a class.
What is an object?
In many programming languages, an uninitialized variable can have this kind of unpredictable value, making its state unknowable until accessed.
What is a garbage value?
A human computer whose calculations were influential for the US space program in the 1960s. Also, one of the first Black women to work as a NASA scientist.
Who is Katherine B. Johnson
Let's say you want to run a red light but tell the police that it was actually green when you saw it. To achieve this you travel almost at the speed of light. What kind of ______ shift is this?
What is blueshift
In 2020, this tech-related program was started.
What is data science?
When applying Newton’s 2nd law to a system with many objects, assuming no thermal dissipation, you can solve the system as if it were actually just one object located at this point.
What is the Center of Mass
Occurs when an arithmetic operation attempts to create a value that is outside the range of representable numbers. Often results in unusual and mathematically incorrect results.
What is overflow?
This theorem establishes a fundamental connection between symmetries in nature and conservation laws and was discovered by German mathematician Emmy [redacted last name that is name of theorem] in 1918. (ex. conservation of energy is related to the symmetry of time-translation invariance)
What is Noether's theorem
This famous recursive problem involves moving disks between three pegs while following specific rules and is often used to teach recursion.
What is the Tower of Hanoi?
What can you do with a physics major?
Lots of things! Any answer (at least 1) close to graduate school, engineering, law, computer science, applied math, or anything else ;)
This object orientation principle allows an object to take many forms by treating derived classes as instances of a common base class.
What is polymorphism?
An undecidable problem of determining whether a given program will halt or run forever.
What is the Halting Problem?
Introduced a SOLID principle, which states that objects should be replaceable by instances of their subtypes without breaking the program.
Who is Barbara Liskov
Einstein's general relativity equation, also known as the Einstein field equation, is represented as: Gμν = (8πG/c⁴)Tμν; where G is the gravitational constant, c is the speed of light, and Tμν is the stress-energy tensor representing the distribution of matter and energy. What is Gμν in this equation (hint, it is a tensor!)?
What is the Einstein tensor (representing the curvature of spacetime!)
The dean of the new School of Computing, Data Sciences, and Physics.
Who is Douglas Schmidt?
Describes a system's motion as the path that minimizes a quantity called "action" (Newton did not discover this!)
What is Lagrangian mechanics
Major unsolved problem that asks whether every problem whose solution can be verified quickly can also be solved. One of the Millennium Prize Problems.
What is P vs NP?