Számítás

Számítás is the act of determining a result using numbers, measures, or symbolic rules. In Hungarian, the term covers arithmetic calculation as well as more general computation. The word is formed from szám (number) and -ítás, a suffix indicating an action or process. The verb számít means to count or calculate.

In mathematics, számítás refers to procedures that produce a result from given inputs. This includes basic arithmetic operations as well as broader problem-solving methods. The field is often divided into numerical calculation, which relies on numbers and approximations, and symbolic computation, which manipulates symbols and algebraic expressions without substituting specific numbers.

Historically, calculation began with counting and simple devices such as tally sticks, progressed to the abacus, and later to Hindu-Arabic numerals and mechanical calculators. The 19th and 20th centuries brought formal algorithmic thinking and the rise of computers, transforming calculation from manual arithmetic to automated processing.

In computer science, számítás denotes the formal process of producing an output from an input according to a set of rules. Models such as Turing machines and formal algorithms study what can be computed, how efficiently, and under what resource constraints. Subfields include numerical analysis, which approximates solutions to mathematical problems with methods like iteration and rounding, and symbolic computation, which enables exact manipulation of mathematical expressions.

Applications of számítás span science, engineering, finance, statistics, and data analysis, and the term also appears in everyday language as estimation or forecasting, reflecting its central role in both theory and practice.