27 Facts About Edsger Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, and science essayist.

Edsger Dijkstra'sfather was a chemist who was president of the Dutch Chemical Society; he taught chemistry at a secondary school and was later its superintendent.

Edsger Dijkstra'smother was a mathematician, but never had a formal job.

Edsger Dijkstra had considered a career in law and had hoped to represent the Netherlands in the United Nations.

Edsger Dijkstra stumbled on his career quite by accident, and through his supervisor, Professor Johannes Haantjes, he met Adriaan van Wijngaarden, the director of the Computation Department at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, who offered Edsger Dijkstra a job; he officially became the Netherlands' first "programmer" in March 1952.

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Some time Edsger Dijkstra remained committed to physics, working on it in Leiden three days out of each week.

When Dijkstra married Maria C Debets in 1957, he was required as a part of the marriage rites to state his profession.

From 1952 until 1962, Dijkstra worked at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam, where he worked closely with Bram Jan Loopstra and Carel S Scholten, who had been hired to build a computer.

Edsger Dijkstra formulated and solved the shortest path problem for a demonstration at the official inauguration of the ARMAC computer in 1956.

In 1962, Edsger Dijkstra moved to Eindhoven, and later to Nuenen, in the south of the Netherlands, where he became a professor in the Mathematics Department at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

Edsger Dijkstra tried to build a group of computer scientists who could collaborate on solving problems.

Edsger Dijkstra joined Burroughs Corporation, a company known then for producing computers based on an innovative hardware architecture, as its research fellow in August 1973.

Edsger Dijkstra'sduties consisted of visiting some of the firm's research centers a few times a year and carrying on his own research, which he did in the smallest Burroughs research facility, namely, his study on the second floor of his house in Nuenen.

Edsger Dijkstra was the only research fellow of Burroughs and worked for it from home, occasionally travelling to its branches in the United States.

Edsger Dijkstra accepted the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984.

Edsger Dijkstra worked in Austin until his retirement in November 1999.

Edsger Dijkstra died on 6 August 2002 after a long struggle with cancer.

Edsger Dijkstra's algorithm is used in SPF, Shortest Path First, which is used in the routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS.

Edsger Dijkstra was highly original in his way of assessing people's capacity for a job.

Edsger Dijkstra was known for his vocal criticism and absence of social skills when interacting with colleagues.

In many of his more witty essays, Edsger Dijkstra described a fictional company of which he served as chairman.

Edsger Dijkstra described Mathematics Inc as "the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived".

Edsger Dijkstra opposed the inclusion of software engineering under the umbrella of academic computer science.

Edsger Dijkstra was well known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen.

Edsger Dijkstra distributed photocopies of a new EWD among his colleagues.

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Edsger Dijkstra led a modest lifestyle, to the point of being spartan.

Shortly before his death in 2002, Edsger Dijkstra received the ACM PODC Influential-Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation.