The Surprising Difficulty of Using Mathematics in Computer Science 
(Achim Jung, University of Birmingham)

In 1959 the Noble Prize winner Eugene Wigner gave a talk with the title "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences". A write-up is easily available on the Internet, but, briefly, Wigner argued that in the natural sciences, and in physics in particular, mathematics exhibits an "a priori" usefulness and he speculates why this should be so. In computer science we also use mathematical language and mathematical theories, but one should perhaps not speak so much of "applicability" of one to the other, but of a rich and constantly evolving relationship between the two disciplines. I will trace one instance of this relationship; that which starts with Church's lambda calculus in the 1930s and has since led to the development of programming languages such as Haskell.

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