What is a lambda (function)?

Question

For a person without a comp-sci background, what is a lambda in the world of Computer Science?

Answer 1

In computer programming, lambda is a piece of code (statement, expression or a group of them) which takes some arguments from an external source. It must not always be an anonymous function - we have many ways to implement them.

We have clear separation between expressions, statements and functions, which mathematicians do not have.

The word "function" in programming is also different - we have "function is a series of steps to do" (from Latin "perform"). In math it is something about correlation between variables.

Functional languages are trying to be as similar to math formulas as possible, and their words mean almost the same. But in other programming languages we have it different.