<p>I'm wondering what the computer science department is like at Yale. I've heard that it's very theoretical and math-heavy compared to lower ranked colleges. Is this true?</p>
<p>Yale has an excellent CS department, despite the lower rankings. IMO it’s often underrated, and in fact has one of the oldest CS departments in the world, founded in 1969 and led by the very first Turing Award winner, Alan Perlis. Over time something happened and the department kind of lost its stature (probably had something to do with Perlis dying in 1990), but it’s still well-regarded. Academia has hordes of CS professors who did their undergrad or grad in CS at Yale.</p>
<p>[Matrix</a> of universities by the number of alumni active in top 25 CS departments in the U.S.](<a href=“http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~estan/alumnistatistics/top25/Alumni_matrix.html]Matrix”>Matrix of universities by the number of alumni active in top 25 CS departments in the U.S.)</p>
<p>and that’s just the ones who did their PhD at Yale. I can’t even count how many times I’ve come across a prof at a top CS department who did his/her undergrad in CS at Yale.</p>
<p>Anyway, as for your question, a glance at the research areas and courses at Yale tells me that it has a nice diversity of areas that it focuses on. It does place emphasis on actual computer science, so in that sense it’s more ‘theoretical’ relative to the CS departments that are more pre-professional and have a greater focus on software engineering, systems, etc. But Yale’s focus is not very different from the top departments like Stanford and MIT, which also place a lot of emphasis on the ‘true’ computer science aspect of the field. The main difference is that they do have a greater diversity of areas in CS because they’re much larger than Yale’s CS dept. Regardless, Yale does also engage in more ‘applied’ areas of CS, e.g. AI and distributed computing.</p>
<p>[Computer</a> Science at Yale](<a href=“http://www.cs.yale.edu/research/topics.html]Computer”>http://www.cs.yale.edu/research/topics.html)
[Computer</a> Science Courses](<a href=“http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/]Computer”>Computer Science Courses)</p>