Aim & Scope

The aim of the Centre is to establish in Iceland important areas of basic research in the mathematical foundations of Computer Science, notably Algorithmic Program Verification, Mathematical Logic in Computer Science, Models and Logics for Reactive Systems, Semantics of Computation and Systems Biology, alongside existing activities in Algorithmics, Bioinformatics, Applied and Discrete Mathematics and Machine Learning.

Theoretical Computer Science is a research area in which Iceland now hosts a critical mass of internationally recognized researchers. It is high time to establish a research centre in this field to exploit the available scientific strength in order to

  • focus the research efforts, and establish synergies amongst the active researchers in Iceland,
  • attract outstanding researchers in Theoretical Computer Science to Iceland for short or long term visits leading to collaborations with local researchers and to improvements in the Icelandic research environment,
  • organize international conferences and workshops in Theoretical Computer Science in Iceland to put the country firmly on the map as a recognized conference location for high quality events in the field, and
  • attract young, outstanding students from Iceland to this research area.
The research centre is a collaboration between the Dept. of Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering, University of Iceland, and the School of Computer Science, Reykjavík University, and is based at both institutions.


"THESIS: Never let ideology or "good taste" stop you from proving a good theorem."
"I love to do research, I want to do research, I have to do research, and I hate to sit down and begin to do research---I always try to put it off just as long as I can.
....Isn't there something I can (must?) do first? Shouldn't I sharpen my pencils perhaps?"
---Paul Halmos, I Want to be a Mathematician
If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one! And that's the way to become a computer scientist.
-- Richard Feynmann, Feynmann Lectures on Computation