This special lecture marks Moshe Vardi's election to the National Academy of Engineering.

During the past twenty-five years there has been extensive, continuous, and growing interaction between logic and computer science. In fact, logic has been called "the calculus of computer science". The argument is that logic plays a fundamental role in computer science, similar to that played by calculus in the physical sciences and traditional engineering disciplines. Indeed, logic plays an important role in areas of computer science as disparate as architecture (logic gates), software engineering (specification and verification), programming languages (semantics, logic programming), databases (relational algebra and SQL), artificial intelligence (automatic theorem proving), algorithms (complexity and expressiveness), and theory of computation (general notions of computability). This talk provides an overview of the unusual effectiveness of logic in computer science by surveying the history of logic in computer science and presenting some of the areas in which logic played a crucial role.