History

The School of Informatics and Mathematical Science was established in 1995, integrating the former School of Applied Mathematics and Physics and the former School of Information Science.

Computers were invented in the 1940s. In the latter half of the 1950s, the emergence of new academic fields concerning control, telecommunication and computers and the progress of new applied mathematics along with their emergence attracted the interest of many people. The former School of Applied Mathematics and Physics was established in 1959 under such circumstances, to eliminate the bottleneck of the science and technology that were becoming increasingly specialized and fractioned, and to realize the rapid growth of academic research and industry by developing researchers and engineers who are highly informed of mathematics and can deal with science and technology, which were becoming increasingly sophisticated in terms of mathematical science, and can understand the fields common to various disciplines of engineering and the fields ranging across the boundary between them from a comprehensive point of view. Kyoto University started research on intelligence and information in the latter half of the 1950, such as computer hardware and programming systems, the recognition of audio and image data to provide computers with intelligence, and language information processing; however, with the rapid development of computers, the need arose for teaching and researching about them more deeply, widely and systematically. Under such circumstances, the former School of Information Science was established in 1970, to develop creative researchers and engineers having a deep knowledge and broad perspective for information science.

The systems that are the subject of research at the School of Informatics and Mathematical Science are becoming huge and increasingly complicated. Today each of them is an amalgam of specialized fields of engineering. To cope with such circumstances, it is essential to 1) investigate what is information, which is one of the bases of modern science and technology along with energy and substances, and 2) use the conceptual thinking of mathematical science that grasps each entire system from a cross-cutting point of view to pursue methodology for solutions to present problems. For this purpose, the former two departments; School of Applied Mathematics and Physics and School of Information Science, and the Department of Applied Systems Science cooperated both in education and in research until fiscal 1994 in the Graduate School of Engineering. Based on the integrated-education and graduate school-centered project at the Faculty of Engineering, the former School of Applied Mathematics and Physics and School of Information Science were merged in fiscal 1995 into the School of Informatics and Mathematical Science, starting thorough education and research based on a new philosophy.