Forsythe did not coin 'computer science' — the term was already entering the language, per Knuth's 1972 CACM retrospective

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The popular attribution that George Forsythe coined the term "computer science" is contradicted by the most authoritative primary account available: Donald Knuth's "George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science," written as a tribute months after Forsythe's April 1972 death, drawing on Forsythe's own correspondence and publications, and published in the ACM's flagship journal. Knuth states that Forsythe "did not invent the term 'computer science,'" which had "gradually been working its way into the English language," while allowing that "his influence was an important factor in the present widespread acceptance of the term." Knuth separately dates Forsythe's own first documented use of the term to 1961 — in the paper "Engineering Students Must Learn both Computing and Mathematics" (Journal of Engineering Education 52 (1961), 177-188), where Forsythe wrote that "the name of Computer Sciences is being attached to the discipline as it emerges." That 1961 wording is distinct from the "art and science of exploiting automatic digital computers" definition found four years later in his 1965 Stanford Technical Report CS26.

This corrects, from the primary record, the "widely credited with coining" framing carried secondhand into the vault by MacTutor (Tier 3) and left explicitly contested in claim-forsythe-coined-computer-science-and-founded-stanford-cs. It is the same shape as "deep learning" predating Hinton: a discipline's name gets fused, in retrospect, to its most visible institution-builder rather than to whoever first wrote it down. Knuth's account is careful to separate influence over adoption from invention — Forsythe had the former, not the latter.

The passage is a single sentence, not two, and it spans a column break rather than a page break: it begins at the foot of the left-hand column of p. 722 ("...Forsythe did not invent the term 'computer science,' which had") and resumes at the head of the right-hand column of the same page ("gradually been working its way into the English language, but his influence was an important factor in the present widespread acceptance of the term"). Every word is independently confirmed present in the extracted primary text, but pdftotext reads the two-column page line by line across both columns, so the continuation is emitted upstream of its own beginning and the complete sentence does not pass an automated contiguous-string check. It is therefore presented as a direct reading of the primary document rather than as one machine-verified block quote — the maximal verified fragment is the source_quote above.