Would math best communicate with ET?

13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life

All this just to keep a bunch of people employed until retirement...sigh... EDTA

A quote from the linked piece starts off on shaky footing: In the Introduction, Baylor computer-science professor Robert Marks II asks readers the following questions about information: Robert Marks is a professor of electrical engineering, has 3 degrees in the field. See here: http://www.ecs.baylor.edu/index.php?id=867230 Because of the the confusion over the difference between computer 'scientists' (CS degreed individuals) and engineers, the tech revolution foisted a situation in academia as follows. Confusion in the minds of the public and in journalists minds starting in the '80's, departments of electrical engineering across the country were obliged into changing their moniker to "Department(s) of Electrical and Computer Engineering". Kids were thinking they could design computer and digital hardware if they got a CS degree which is false. Chips and systems for the tech sector are designed by electrical engineers and computer engineers. The EE departments even began to offer the B.S. in "computer engineering" (CE) for those kids that didn't want to take advanced vector calculus or complex variables. In other words kids who wanted to "go into computers" but didn't want to do all the heavy courses in math, linear and stochastic processes, and electromagnetics that EE's traditionally studied. So the departments essentially compromised and so doing became typically the 2nd largest on campus, business administration being the largest such as is the case at UT Austin. In this way we have students with degrees in computer engineering who avoided the courses that would make them more employable in industries such as telecommunications, robotics, and industrial control. On the other hand people with degrees in electrical engineering can, with the right coursework do everything the other guys can do, and better. BTW information theory is not part of the core CS or CE curriculum. It is taught in courses on statistical communications for the BSEE, prerequisites being signals and systems theory. Kids wanting to "go into computers" with a CE degree usually don't want to do that kind of heavy lifting. See here for example: http://posterwall.com/blog_attachment.php?attachmentid=4573&d=1318295130 ---- At the undergraduate level, departments of mathematics will also introduce information theory, which BTW was invented by Claude Shannon who had degrees in EE and wrote the most famous master's thesis of the 20th century for his MSEE. See here: http://submit.boingboing.net/2012/04/possibly-the-most-important-and-also-the-most-famous-masters-thesis-of-the-century.html BTW there are areas of software design in which EE's with the substantial math background for the BSEE are more qualified than BCS individuals. EE's established public key encryption using mathematical one-way ('surjective') functions, they pioneered comm coding protocols and standards for mobile devices, graphics processing, image compression, digital signal processing (DSP) and the mathematical code necessary for these functions to exist. Image processing is an outgrowth of DSP and the reason EE's can excel at this stuff is because those applications are heavily dependent on intimate knowledge of integral transforms and complex variables which are core parts of the EE curriculum. groovamos