Computer Science Today [antikvár]

Preface This volume of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence) marks a truly unique and festive moment: it is the 1000th volume that is appearing in the series. To commemorate the special occasion, this volume presents a unique collection of expository papers on major themes that are representative for computer science 'today'. The papers were written by leading experts and teams in the computer science area with a very specific goal in mind, namely to demonstrate the scope and stature of the field today and give an impression of some of the chief motivations and challenges for tomorrow's computer science. The series was founded in 1973 on the initiative of Klaus Peters and his wife Alice Peters, who were the responsible editors within Springer-Verlag at the time for the mathematics and economics-oriented publishing activities. The successful Lecture Notes in Mathematics (published since 1964) and Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems (published since 1968, initially as Lecture Notes in Operations Research and Mathematical Economics and later as Lecture Notes in Operations Research and Mathematical Systems) were the leading examples for the series. It was first named 'Lecture Notes in Computer Science' in an internal Springer memo of Walter Kaufmann-Biihler to Klaus Peters dated January 23, 1973. Gerhard Goos, who had become an editor of the Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems in 1972, was asked to become editor of the new series and shortly later, on the invitation by Alice Peters in March 1973, Juris Hartmanis joined as series editor as well. With the strategic support of the Advisory Board, Goos and Hartmanis have directed the series since. Under their editorial rule, the series developed into the exceedingly valuable collection of volumes that it is today, indispensable for the practicing scientist in any branch of computer science or related discipline. It is extremely interesting and educational to look again at the first one-hundred volumes that appeared in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science and to see how they reflect the gradual formation of computer science as a science through the 1970s in Europe and in the world. There were influential lecture notes from conferences, schools and advanced courses on compiler construction, complexity theory, distributed systems, net theory, operating systems, optimization methods, program construction, programming languages and their implementation, and software engineering, to mention just a few of the volumes. Conferences like the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP, starting at Volume 14) and the Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS, starting at Volume 28) were among the first to record their proceedings in the Lecture Notes series. From the very beginning, course notes such as Sheila Greibach's "Theory of Program Structures: Schemes, Semantics, Verification" (Volume 36), monographs like Robin Milner's "A Calculus of Communicating Systems" (Volume 92), selected Ph.D. theses like Joost Engelfriet's (Volume 20) and Samuel Puller's