Ryan Peterman

I mean, modeling things then give rise to problems that you want to understand.

So I think the modeling part in the theory of computation, modeling various forms of computation, is a large part of it.

Theoretical computer science manifests itself in particular in cryptography.

There are models of adversely distributed computation.

I think modeling, just asking questions and making definitions, is a very central part of the field.

And it happens more than in mathematics, maybe because they are more ancient than maybe definitions happened earlier.

But I want to stress this.

That's a very important thing.

For example, we discussed randomness.

And our definition of randomness is totally different.

And it gives rise to very surprising and interesting practically theorems.

Okay, now that we said that,

What motivates me or what motivates other people, of course everybody has their own motivation.

I am a product of computer science education.

All my undergrad and grad school and postdoc and everything were in computer science.

So I think that I certainly am sorry that I didn't take many more math courses because then I wouldn't have to learn things later in life.

But that aside, I think that the focus on computation, which is what computer science education gives you,

different systems and different issues.

There are, of course, algorithms in databases and algorithms in programming languages and, in fact, famous algorithms.

In other fields, there are models and algorithms.