Joseph F. Traub, who founded the computer science department at Columbia University and who helped develop algorithms used in scientific computing in physics and mathematics as well as on Wall Street, died on Monday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 83.

The cause could not be immediately determined, his wife, Pamela McCorduck, said.

Professor Traub took a detour from physics and became immersed in computing in the 1950s, well before there was a discipline known as computer science.

As an educator, he was a skillful advocate, both for more resources and more respectability for the young field at a time when the people grappling with the big machines in computer centers were regarded in much of academia as glorified mechanics.

He became the dean of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1971 and had built the faculty to 50 people from a handful by 1979, when he left for Columbia, where he had been recruited to become the founding dean of the new computer science department.