Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930 to 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist whose work shaped both the theory and the discipline of programming. In his autobiographical note “From my Life” (EWD1166), he recounts attending a programming course for the EDSAC computer in 1951 and being hired by Amsterdam’s Mathematical Centre in 1952, becoming, as he put it, the first Dutchman on a payroll with the qualification “programmer.”
Dijkstra is best known to many for his shortest-path algorithm, which he published in 1959 in the paper “A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs.” That same paper also presented a method for building a shortest spanning tree, and in “From my Life” he lists both the shortest-path and the shortest-spanning-tree problems among the algorithms he designed in his early career.
His influence extended well beyond graph algorithms. He designed an early ALGOL 60 implementation, introduced semaphores and the mutual-exclusion problem for coordinating concurrent processes, and led the development of the THE multiprogramming system, which he described as built from loosely coupled, explicitly synchronized cooperating sequential processes. He was also a forceful advocate for program correctness and for structured programming, famously arguing in a 1968 letter that the go-to statement should be eliminated.
Dijkstra received the A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, recognized for the year 1972, for fundamental contributions to programming as a high, intellectual discipline. He continued writing his numbered manuscripts, the EWDs, for decades, and the collection is preserved as the E. W. Dijkstra Archive at the University of Texas at Austin.