The Department of Computer Sciences (Institutionen för informationsbehandling) was founded in 1965 as a response to the increasing demand of computational mathematics in science and engineering. From the very beginning the research and teaching covered a broad range from theoretical numerical analysis to programming techniques, and the research was often inspired by challenging applications such as fluid dynamics and weather prediction. These ideas were strongly advocated by the first professor Heinz-Otto Kreiss, who had already in 1962 given the first course in numerical analysis at the Uppsala University, Mathematics Department. He was at that time a rising star in the international scientific community, and brought in famous international scientists.

The name of the department was later changed to Scientific Computing (teknisk databehandling, TDB). The acronym TDB was used as a name, and it still prevails as a trademark. TDB was from the start responsible for teaching programming to students in science and technology. Since programming is of interest for several disciplines, there have been numerous discussions about the contents in the programming courses and the responsibility for teaching programming. The close connection to computer programming has shown to be beneficial for the research at TDB. It has also contributed to making the students attractive among employers.

Over the years there has been a systematic effort to establish contacts with other research institutions and industry in order to find relevant research problems. Large scale computations requiring high performance computers led to the need for new algorithms. A consequence was the creation of the Parallel and Scientific Computing Institute together with KTH. This institute further contributed to the broadening of the research and the expansion of TDB. In teaching the growth started already in the early eighties. The creation of the Scientific Computing branch of the Engineering Physics program was a significant corner-stone of this development.

Scientific Computing was successfully integrated as a division in the larger Department of Information Technology in 1999, with reinforced cooperation between different disciplines as a consequence. The broad activities including theory, programming and real world applications, which is quite unique internationally, has shown to be successful, and is a strong and stable platform for future development.

Bertil Gustafsson (Professor emeritus)
Anders Sjöberg (Former Director of Studies)