Major achievements

This short section requires expansion.

German military used the Enigma machine during World War II for communication they thought to be secret. The large-scale decryption of Enigma traffic at Bletchley Park was an important factor that contributed to Allied victory in WWII.^[8]

Despite its relatively short history as a formal academic discipline, computer science has made a number of fundamental contributions to science and society. These include:

Applications within computer science

• A formal definition of computation and computability, and proof that there are computationally unsolvable and intractable problems^[9].
• The concept of a programming language, a tool for the precise expression of methodological information at various levels of abstraction^[10]

Applications outside of computing

• Sparked the Digital Revolution which led to the current Information Age^[11]
• In cryptography, breaking the Enigma machine was an important factor contributing to the Allied victory in World War II.^[8]
• Scientific computing enabled advanced study of the mind and mapping the human genome was possible with Human Genome Project. ^[11] Distributed computing projects like Folding@home explore protein folding.