Edsger Dijkstra
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Dijkstra's algorithm, semaphores, structured programming
- Awards
- Turing Award 1972
The Dutchman who turned programming into a mathematical discipline — and who said so with a sharpness that made him both quoted and feared.
He worked out the shortest-path algorithm in about twenty minutes in 1956, at a café in Amsterdam, without pen or paper. He introduced semaphores and formulated the dining philosophers problem, still used to teach deadlock. His 1968 letter "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" set off the structured programming movement.
He wrote his papers by hand and numbered them EWD; over a thousand survive. The formulations are famous: that testing can show the presence of bugs but never their absence, and that asking whether machines can think is about as interesting as asking whether submarines can swim.