Edsger Wybe Dijkstra Biography

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World of Computer Science on Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the pioneers of theoretical computer science. Beginning in the late 1940s he helped develop what became modern computing architecture. It is said that Dijkstra was the person who found the answer to a problem that others weren't even aware existed.

Throughout his career as a legendary algorithm researcher and inventor, Dijkstra promoted the idea that programming languages constitute both science and art. He contributed greatly to the understanding of these languages' structure, description, and implementation. His fifteen years of publications extend from theoretical articles on graph theory to basic manuals, textbooks, and philosophical observations on the field of programming languages.

Dijkstra was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, to educated parents: his father was a chemist working as a chemistry teacher and superintendent, and his mother was a mathematician. In 1942 he entered the Gymnasium Erasminium and was educated in a comprehensive group of subjects ranging from various languages to the arts and sciences. In 1945, at the age of 15, Dijkstra decided that he would like to study law, and even thought about eventually serving as a United Nations representative for The Netherlands. Because he had scored extremely high in mathematics, physics, and chemistry he instead entered the University of Leiden, where he studied mathematics and theoretical physics. However, during the summer of 1951, he took a three-week programming course for electronic computers at Cambridge University, a course that would eventually change his life.

In March 1952, while still in school, Dijkstra began working part-time as a computer programmer at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam. This work helped to further his interest in computer programming. He finished the requirements for his physics degree in 1956 and began to pursue his interest in programming with the Mathematical Centre, this time as a full-time employee. One problem encountered by Dijkstra was that many technical errors and experiences were not written down while developing computer software. He learned early on that proper documentation was essential to the development of computers. Therefore, Dijkstra began to write programmer's manuals for computers, including complete functional descriptions. Dijkstra was somewhat hampered in these efforts by the lack of official recognition of programming as a profession. In fact, when he applied for a marriage license in 1957, his profession was officially stated as "theoretical physicist."

While he was employed with the Mathematical Centre, Dijkstra created one of the most famous algorithms in computing history, called "The Shortest Path." He had been given the assignment of demonstrating the computing powers of the ARMAC, a scientific computer built for a forthcoming International Mathematical Conference. It is said that Dijkstra began to think about the problem of determining the shortest route between two points on a railroad map. Stymied by the problem, Dijkstra sat with his wife on the terrace of a café one morning when he suddenly fell silent. In a matter of minutes he had solved the algorithm--in his head, without pencil and paper. This algorithm brought Dijkstra much fame in the computing world. He was also able to solve a problem about finding a way to distribute electricity to all possible circuits while using as little copper wire as possible. He called it the algorithm for the "Shortest Spanning Tree."

Dijkstra was a principal contributor during the late 1950s in the development and implementation of Algol-60, a high level programming language that Dijkstra was instrumental in making mathematically correct. This work contributed to establishing his name among America's best computer scientists. In 1959 Dijkstra earned his Doctorate of Science from Queen's University Belfast.

Dijkstra became a professor of mathematics at Eindhoven University of Technology in 1962. At this time Dijkstra applied the idea of mutual exclusion to communications between a computer and its keyboard. He used the letters P and V to represent the two operations that go on in a mutually exclusive problem. This idea has become a part of modern processors and memory boards since 1964, when International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) first used it in its IBM-360 architecture. He also coined the phrase "GO TO considered harmful"--this meant that the more GO TO statements contained in a program, the more difficult it is to follow the program's source code. In 1968 Dijkstra laid the foundation for creating structured programming by writing a letter entitled "GO TO Statement Considered Harmful." This helped to develop more reliable software.

Dijkstra was awarded the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award in 1972. During this period of time he said, "The reason that I have paid the above attention to the hardware scene is because I have the feeling that one of the most important aspects of any computing tool is its influence on the thinking habits of those who try to use it, and because I have reasons to believe that the influence is many times stronger than commonly assumed." Dijkstra continued to work at the Mathematical Centre until he accepted a job in 1973 as a research fellow for Burroughs Corporation in the United States. At this time he designed the first so-called "self-stabilizing systems" to help in data recovery. In the fall of 1973 Dijkstra designed "predicate transformers" as a tool for defining the way that computer programs could represent differential calculus. He was presented with the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Harry Goode Memorial Award in 1974.

In 1984 Dijkstra accepted the position of Chair with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he currently occupies the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences. Dijkstra is a Foreign Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Dijkstra died of cancer on August 7, 2002, in Austin, Texas. He was 72.