Despite its short history as a formal academic discipline, computer science has made a number of fundamental contributions to science and society—in fact, along with electronics, it is a founding science of the current epoch of human history called the Information Age and a driver of the Information Revolution, seen as the third major leap in human technological progress after the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850 CE) and the Agricultural Revolution (8000–5000 BC).

The German military used the Enigma machine (shown here) during World War II for communications they wanted kept secret. The large-scale decryption of Enigma traffic at Bletchley Park was an important factor that contributed to Allied victory in WWII.

These contributions include

• The start of the "digital revolution", which includes the current Information Age and the Internet.^[21]
• A formal definition of computation and computability, and proof that there are computationally unsolvable and intractable problems.^[22]
• The concept of a programming language, a tool for the precise expression of methodological information at various levels of abstraction.^[23]
• In cryptography, breaking the Enigma code was an important factor contributing to the Allied victory in World War II.^[20]
• Scientific computing enabled practical evaluation of processes and situations of great complexity, as well as experimentation entirely by software. It also enabled advanced study of the mind, and mapping of the human genome became possible with the Human Genome Project.^[21] Distributed computing projects such as Folding@home explore protein folding.
• Algorithmic trading has increased the efficiency and liquidity of financial markets by using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other statistical and numerical techniques on a large scale.^[24] High frequency algorithmic trading can also exacerbate volatility.^[25]
• Computer graphics and computer-generated imagery have become ubiquitous in modern entertainment, particularly in television, cinema, advertising, animation and video games. Even films that feature no explicit CGI are usually "filmed" now on digital cameras, or edited or post-processed using a digital video editor