Have you ever wondered what a computer is and how it actually works? In this course, we’ll answer the hardware half of this question. Working from the ground up, we will start with basic circuits and develop elementary logic gates. Taking these gates as our building blocks, we will construct the core components of a modern computer. Our journey will culminate in using machine code to control the computer we have designed.
What is computation? This is the question that birthed Computer Science as a discipline, and serves as the focal point of this course. Our plan for answering it is twofold. First, we will introduce functional programming through Scheme (a dialect of Lisp). Second, we will use our understanding of functional programming to explore the nature of computation itself. This will involve reading parts of Alonzo Church’s revolutionary article, “An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory.” We will see how the notion of computation emerges from his understanding of functions, and engage with the fundamental conjecture of Computer Science (the Church-Turing Thesis).
