COMPUTER SCIENCE IN FRENCH UNIVERSITIES: EARLY ENTRANTS AND LATECOMERS
Résumé
Keywords: Discipline building, computer science, engineering education, interdisciplinarity
How do new disciplines develop in certain universities, not in others ? The history of computer science in France suggests a model to describe the development and differenciation process which shapes the geography of science.
In the 1950s, a few professors of numerical analysis, often associated with a school of electrical engineering, created three-fold structures comprising courses in applied mathematics and programming, a computing facility and a research laboratory. Such local configurations initiated a cumulative development process, attracting more resources and opening the field to novel applications or investigations – computer science. In other universities, these configurations were not completed and computing remained confined to technical training, typically with an assistant and a small
machine.
In the 1960s, the pioneers became the leaders of the new informatics field and controlled the definition of computer science curricula. As the institutes they had created reached considerable size, they began to spin off their junior professors toward other universities. These centers remain major academic centers in the discipline today.