Initially started in 1963 as the Department of Numerical Analysis, UW–Madison became home to one of the oldest computer science programs in the country. More information on the history of our department can be found in the Department Brochure. A personal history of the Department by Professor Emeritus Seymour Parter can be found here. The latest edition of the semi-annual Department Newsletter BadgerBytes can be found here.

Measures of Excellence

• Ranked the 10th best doctoral program in the United States in 1995 by the National Research Council (NRC), the most respected organization reviewing the nation’s doctorate programs.
• Ranked the ninth best computer science program in the nation in the 2007 U.S. News and World Report ranking of America’s best graduate programs, up one point from its last ranking of 10th in 2002.
• Recognized nationally as having the world’s leading research specialty groups in computer architecture, database systems, distributed and grid computing, and nonlinear optimization.
• Two faculty—Carl de Boor and Stephen Kleene—have received a National Medal of Science, one of the most prestigious awards given in the sciences.
• The department is fifth in the nation in the total number of doctoral graduates placed on the faculty of top–25 computer science departments. The department placed 20 such graduates in the past decade. Only MIT, UC–Berkeley, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon produced more.
• The department has produced 17 winners of the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious grant awards, including the Presidential Young Investigator, the NSF Young Investigator and the Career awards.
• Eleven faculty are Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and four are Fellows of the IEEE.
• Six faculty—Reps (1983), Bach (Series Winner, 1984), van Melkebeek (1999), Doan (2003), Liblit (2005), & Snyder (Honorable Mention, 2010)—have won Dissertation Awards by ACM, including four ACM Dissertation Awards, one Honorable Mention, and one Series Winner.
• More than 3,500 CPUs fuel the UW–Madison HTCondor project, a 20-year- old initiative that is now a world leader in high-throughput computing and has attracted hundreds of sites and thousands of users in both academia and industry.