AFCAL and the Emergence of Computer Science in France: 1957-1967

Pierre-Éric Mounier-Kuhn (1, 2) , Maël Pégny (2, 3)

1 UP4 - Université Paris-Sorbonne
2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 IHPST - Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques

Founded in 1957, the Association Française de Calcul (AFCAL) was the first French society dedicated mainly to numerical computation. Its rapid growth and amalgamation with sister societies in related fields (Operations Research, Automatic Control) in the 1960s resulted in changes of its name and purpose, including the invention and adoption of the term informatique in 1962-1964, then of the adoption of cybernétique in 1967. Our paper aims at explicating the motives of its creation, its evolving definition and the functions it fulfilled. We seek to understand how this association, altogether a learned and a professional society, contributed to the emergence and recognition of Computing as an academic discipline in France. The main sources are the scattered surviving records of AFCAL, conserved in the archives

Keywords: computer science; learned society; afcal; history

Domains: History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences

Pierre-Éric Mounier-Kuhn, Maël Pégny. AFCAL and the Emergence of Computer Science in France: 1957-1967. Pursuit of the Universal, Jun 2016, Paris, France. ⟨hal-01470302⟩