Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (Dutch: [ˈɛtsxər ˈʋibə ˈdɛikstra] ( listen); 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist.

Biography

He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

Dijkstra was one of the most influential members of computing science’s founding generation.

Through his fundamental contributions Edsger Dijkstra helped shape the field of computer science.

His contributions ranged from the engineering side of computer science to the theoretical one and covered several areas including:

• Compiler construction
• Operating systems
• Distributed systems
• Sequential programming and concurrent programming
• Software engineering
• Graph algorithms

Many of his papers are the source of whole new research areas.

Several concepts that are now completely standard in computer science were first identified by Dijkstra and/or bear names coined by him.

See also

• Computer programming
• Computer science
• Computer scientist
• Go To Statement Considered Harmful
• Operating system
• Programming language
• Software engineering
• Structured programming

External links

• Edsger W. Dijkstra @ Wikipedia