I · The foundations

Edsger W. Dijkstra

1930–2002

Computer scientist · TU Eindhoven · UT Austin

Gave us

Dijkstra's algorithm (shortest path). The semaphore. Structured programming. The "GOTO considered harmful" letter.

The story

Dutch, opinionated, and unapologetically theoretical. Wrote his EWDs (Edsger W. Dijkstra notes) by hand in numbered, dated essays — over 1300 of them.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

More from The foundations

Claude Shannon Mathematician at Bell Labs · MIT Alan Turing Mathematician · Government Code & Cypher School · NPL · Manchester John von Neumann Mathematician · Institute for Advanced Study · Manhattan Project Donald Knuth Stanford emeritus · author of The Art of Computer Programming Leslie Lamport Microsoft Research · ex-DEC SRC · 2013 Turing laureate

Across the field

II Guido van Rossum Microsoft · ex-Dropbox · ex-Google · creator of Python II Anders Hejlsberg Microsoft technical fellow · creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript II Graydon Hoare Independent · ex-Mozilla · creator of Rust III Tim Berners-Lee CERN · W3C · Inrupt · creator of the World Wide Web III Vint Cerf Google chief internet evangelist · co-creator of TCP/IP III Paul Mockapetris Inventor of DNS · USC ISI III Brendan Eich Brave Software · ex-Mozilla · creator of JavaScript III Daniel Stenberg wolfSSL · creator and maintainer of curl

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