Edsger Dijkstra
Prof Dr Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a
Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 A. M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions in the area of programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at
The University of Texas from 1984 until his death in 2002.
Encyclopedia
Prof Dr
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a
Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 A. M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions in the area of programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at
The University of Texas from 1984 until his death in 2002.
Life
Dijkstra studied
theoretical physics at the
University of Leiden, but he quickly realized he was more interested in programming.
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, the THE operating system, 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.
He was also known for his low opinion of the GOTO statement in computer programming, culminating in the 1968 article "" , 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. The paper's more 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 team that implemented the first
compiler for that language. Dijkstra and Jaap Zonneveld, who collaborated on the compiler, agreed not to shave until the project was completed. Zonneveld eventually shaved off his beard; Dijkstra kept his until his death.
From the
1970s, Dijkstra's chief interest was formal verification. The prevailing opinion at the time was that one should first write a program and then provide a mathematical proof of correctness. Dijkstra objected that the resulting proofs are long and cumbersome, and that the proof gives no insight as to how the program was developed. An alternative method is
program derivation, to "develop proof and program hand in hand". One starts with a mathematical
specification of what a program is supposed to do and applies mathematical transformations to the specification until it is turned into a program that can be executed. The resulting program is then known to be
correct by construction. Much of Dijkstra's later work concerns ways to streamline mathematical argument. In a 2001 interview, he stated a desire for "elegance", whereby the correct approach would be to process thoughts mentally, rather than attempt to render them until they are complete. The analogy he made was to contrast the compositional approaches of
Mozart and
Beethoven.
Dijkstra was known for his essays on programming; he was the first to make the claim that programming is so inherently difficult and complex that programmers need to harness every trick and abstraction possible in hopes of managing the complexity of it successfully. He is also known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his
fountain pen. The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with
EWD as prefix. Dijkstra would distribute photocopies of a new EWD among his colleagues; as many recipients photocopied and forwarded their copy, the EWDs spread throughout the international computer science community . The topics are mainly computer science and mathematics, but also include trip reports, letters, and speeches. Many of the more than 1300 EWDs have since been scanned, with a growing number also transcribed to facilitate search, and are available online at the Dijkstra archive of the University of Texas.
Dijkstra is also noted for never owning a computer and rarely using one.
He died in Nuenen,
The Netherlands on August 6, 2002 after a long struggle with
cancer.
Andrzej Sapkowski, Polish fantasy writer, used Dijkstra's name for one of the main character in the five book "Saga" about
The Hexer.
See also
References
Writings by E.W. Dijkstra
- Go To Statement Considered Harmful, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11 147–148;
- A Discipline of Programming, Prentice-Hall Series in Automatic Computation, 1976, ISBN 0-13-215871-X
- Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective, Texts and Monographs in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 1982, ISBN 0-387-90652-5
- A Method of Programming, E.W. Dijkstra, W.H.J. Feijen, J. Sterringa, Addison Wesley 1988, ISBN 0-201-17536-3
Others about Dijkstra, eulogies
- Digidome
- Obituary in Formal Aspects of Computing with a short biography
- by David Gries
- by J Strother Moore
- by Mario Szegedy
External links
