What is Scholar's mate?

In chess, the scholar's mate is the checkmate achieved by the following moves, or similar:

The same mating pattern may be reached by various move orders. For example, White might play 2.Bc4. In all variations, the basic idea is the same: the queen and bishop combine in a simple mating attack on f7.

The scholar's mate is sometimes referred to as the four-move checkmate, although there are other ways for checkmate to occur in four moves.