Knuth credits Louis Fein with perceiving computer science's rise before Forsythe — a 1957 Stanford graduate-school proposal and a 1961 paper

computer-science-historyterminologyforsytheknuthlouis-feininstitutional-historystanfordpriority

In the same 1972 retrospective that establishes Forsythe did not coin "computer science", Donald Knuth names the figure whose vision of the discipline predates Forsythe's: Louis Fein. Knuth writes that "Louis Fein had also perceived the eventual rise of computer science," and that Fein "had recommended in 1957 that Stanford establish a Graduate School of Computer Science, analogous to the Harvard Business School." Knuth's own reference list cites Fein's paper directly: "Louis Fein, 'The computer-related sciences (Synnoetics) at a university in the year 1975,' Amer. Scientist 49 (1961), 149-168."

The chronology is the point. Fein's published paper (1961) is the same year as Forsythe's own first documented written use of the term — but the Stanford graduate-school proposal Knuth attributes to Fein is dated four years earlier still, to 1957. Knuth groups Fein with Forsythe, Alan Perlis, and Richard Hamming as the small set of people who, unlike most of their mathematical contemporaries, "had no such mental blocks" about computer science as a discipline in its own right.

This is the priority figure against whom the coinage myth is actually measured. It does not settle who first uttered or printed "computer science" — that remains an open etymological question — but it establishes, from a Tier-1 primary, that a named contemporary was arguing for the discipline institutionally at Stanford before Forsythe's earliest documented use of its name. It bears on the same priority-attribution shape as the Purdue-vs-Stanford first-department dispute and the broader pattern in observation-numerical-analysts-founded-first-us-cs-departments.

The full sentences span a two-column page break; the two source_quote fragments each passed the capture's automated verbatim check on either side of the break, and are joined in the prose above as a direct reading of the primary rather than one machine-verified block quote.