The Escuela Superior Latinoamericana de Informática (

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

for "Latin American Superior School of Informatics", ESLAI) was an Argentine undergraduate school of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

established in 1986. Classes were held in a former country house at the Pereyra Iraola Park in Buenos Aires Province, located approximately 40 km from

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

. The school had Argentine mathematician

Manuel Sadosky Manuel Sadosky (April 13, 1914 – June 18, 2005) was an Argentine mathematician, civil servant and author who was born in Buenos Aires to Jewish Russian immigrants who had fled the pogroms in Europe.Jacovkis, Pablo (2015). "MANUEL SADOSKY Y SU I ...

among its main founders. In spite of its short life, it had a considerable impact on informatics teaching and research in Argentina and

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sout ...

. ESLAI courses were attended by students from several Spanish-speaking countries in South America such as Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. All students had a full scholarship and the admission process was passed by about 15% of applicants. ESLAI established cooperation programs with a number of foreign universities in the

Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with th ...

as well as in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

. Those agreements sponsored important visitors to the school, such as Alberto O. Mendelzon,

Jean-Raymond Abrial Jean-Raymond Abrial (born 1938) is a French computer scientist and inventor of the Z and B formal methods. Abrial's 1974 paper ''Data Semantics'' laid the foundation for a formal approach to Data Models; although not adopted directly by practit ...

, Ugo Montanari, Carlo Ghezzi and Giorgio Ausiello, and enabled its students to attend graduate school at foreign universities. The school had a significant European influence and was oriented towards theoretical aspects of computer science, such as

typed lambda calculus A typed lambda calculus is a typed formalism that uses the lambda-symbol (\lambda) to denote anonymous function abstraction. In this context, types are usually objects of a syntactic nature that are assigned to lambda terms; the exact nature of a ...

formal verification In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal met ...

, and Martin-Löf's

intuitionistic type theory Intuitionistic type theory (also known as constructive type theory, or Martin-Löf type theory) is a type theory and an alternative foundation of mathematics. Intuitionistic type theory was created by Per Martin-Löf, a Swedish mathematician an ...

. Unfortunately, ESLAI was never able to develop a relationship with local companies, which in an emergent economy like Argentina's is essential to be involved with more practical problems. Without financial support, ESLAI had to close down in September 1990 during the

presidency A presidency is an administration or the executive, the collective administrative and governmental entity that exists around an office of president of a state or nation. Although often the executive branch of government, and often personified b ...

of Carlos Menem.

References

* * 1986 establishments in Argentina 1990 disestablishments in Argentina Educational institutions established in 1986 Educational institutions disestablished in 1990 Universities in Buenos Aires Province Computer science departments {{computer-science-stub