Edsger dijkstra biography templates

Dutch computer scientist (1930–2002)

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (DYKE-strə; Dutch:[ˈɛtsxərˈʋibəˈdɛikstraː]; 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, mathematician, and science essayist.

Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Dijkstra studied mathematics and physics and then theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. Adriaan van Wijngaarden offered him a job as the first computer programmer in the Netherlands at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, where he worked from 1952 until 1962. He formulated and solved the shortest path problem in 1956, and in 1960 developed the first compiler for the programming language ALGOL 60 in conjunction with colleague Jaap A. Zonneveld. In 1962 he moved to Eindhoven, and later to Nuenen, where he became a professor in the Mathematics Department at the Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven. In the late 1960s he built the THE multiprogramming system, which influenced the designs of subsequent systems through its use of software-based paged virtual memory. Dijkstra joined Burroughs Corporation as its sole research fellow in August 1973. The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the "EWD" series, most of them technical reports, for private circulation within a select group.

Dijkstra accepted the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984, working in Austin, USA, until his retirement in November 1999. He and his wife returned from Austin to his original house in Nuenen, where he died on 6 August 2002 after a long struggle with cancer.

He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing structured programming languages. Shortly before his death, he received the ACMPODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization

During his life he shaped the field of computer science like no other scientist. His ground-breaking contributions ranged from the engineering to the theoretical side of computer science. They covered areas such as compiler construction, operating systems, distributed systems, sequential and concurrent programming, software engineering, and graph algorithms. Many of Dijkstra’s papers, often just a few pages long, are the source of new research areas. Indeed, several concepts that are now standard in computer science were first identified by Dijkstra and bear names coined by him.

Dijkstra did not end up becoming a theoretical physicist, thanks to a discussion with Adriaan van Wijngaarden, at that time director of the Mathematisch Centrum’s Computation Department. After working as a programmer at the centre for three years, he knocked on Van Wijngaarden’s door, full of doubt, as he was finding it difficult to combine his role as a programmer and his study in theoretical physics at the Leiden University. ‘When I left his office hours later,’ Dijkstra said in his 1972 ACM Turing Lecture, ‘I was another person.’ Indeed, though programming was not an established discipline yet, Van Wijngaarden managed to convince Dijkstra that ‘it was here to stay’ and that he could play a part in putting the discipline on the map.

Cornerstone of fame: Dijkstra’s algorithm

And put it on the map he did. Dijkstra worked at the Mathematisch Centrum from 1952 to 1962, where he came up with what has become, in his words, ‘one of the cornerstones of my fame’. That cornerstone is the algorithm for the shortest path, also known as Dijkstra’s algorithm. According to Dijkstra, ‘it was a twenty-minute invention’ that he conceived while having a cup of coffee on a café terrace with his fiancée Ria, who he had met at Mathematisch Centrum. He initially used the algorithm in 1956 to showcase the potential of a new computer called ARMAC

Born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, Edsger Dijkstra studied theoretical physics at Leiden University, but he quickly realized he was more interested in computer science. Originally employed by the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, he held a professorship at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, worked as a research fellow for Burroughs Corporation in the early 1970s, and later held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, in the United States. He retired in 2000.

Among his contributions to computer science is the shortest path-algorithm, also known as Dijkstra’s algorithm; Reverse Polish Notation and related Shunting yard algorithm; the THE multiprogramming system; Banker’s algorithm; and the semaphore construct for coordinating multiple processors and programs. Another concept due to Dijkstra in the field of distributed computing is that of self-stabilization – an alternative way to ensure the reliability of the system. Dijkstra’s algorithm is used in SPF, Shortest Path First, which is used in the routing protocol OSPF, Open Shortest Path First.

While he had programmed extensively in machine code in the 1950s, he was known for his low opinion of the GOTO statement in computer programming, writing a paper in 1965, and culminating in the 1968 article “A Case against the GO TO Statement” (EWD215), regarded as a major step towards the widespread deprecation of the GOTO statement and its effective replacement by structured control constructs, such as the while loop. This methodology was also called structured programming, the title of his 1972 book, coauthored with C.A.R. Hoare and Ole-Johan Dahl. The March 1968 ACM letter’s famous title, “Go To Statement Considered Harmful,” was not the work of Dijkstra, but of Niklaus Wirth, then editor of Communications of the ACM.

Dijkstra was known to be a fan of ALGOL 60, and worked on the

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... she had a great agility in manipulating formulae and a wonderful gift for finding very elegant solutions.

It was a frightening experience: it was the first time that I left the Netherlands, the first time I ever had to understand people speaking English