Edsger dijkstra biography for kids

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (DYKE-strə; Dutch: [ˈɛtsxər ˈʋibə ˈdɛikstra](listen); 11 May 1930 – 6 August 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, systems scientist, and science essayist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing structured programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honor.

Biography

Early years

Edsger W. Dijkstra was born in Rotterdam. His father was a chemist who was president of the Dutch Chemical Society; he taught chemistry at a secondary school and was later its superintendent. His mother was a mathematician, but never had a formal job.

Dijkstra had considered a career in law and had hoped to represent the Netherlands in the United Nations. However, after graduating from school in 1948, at his parents' suggestion he studied mathematics and physics and then theoretical physics at the University of Leiden.

In the early 1950s, electronic computers were a novelty. Dijkstra stumbled on his career by accident, and through his supervisor, Professor Johannes Haantjes [nl], he met Adriaan van Wijngaarden, the director of the Computation Department at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, who offered Dijkstra a job; he officially became the Netherlands' first "programmer" in March 1952.

For some time Dijkstra remained committed to physics, working on it in Leiden three days out of each week. With increasing exposure to computing, however, his focus began to shift.

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

Biography

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was born on May 11, 1930, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His father was a chemist and his mother was a mathematician and in 1942, Dijkstra entered a top high school where he studied classical Greek and Latin, French, German, English, biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry. He earned degrees in mathematics and theoretical physics from the University of Leyden and a Ph.D. in computing science from the University of Amsterdam.

In March 1952 he took a part-time job as a programmer at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, where he worked until 1962. Here he would develop the shortest-path algorithm, a method for finding the most direct route on a graph or map. The algorithm came to him one morning in 1956, and was published in 1959. Dijkstra was also a co-designer of the first version of Algol 60.

In 1962 he became a mathematics professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, where he remained until 1984. In 1965 he formulated the dining philosophers' problem, which involved a problem faced by five philosophers sitting around a table, each with a bowl of rice and a single chopstick. Because eating requires two chopsticks, the challenge was to find an equitable method that would permit all of those at the table to eat without having anyone starve or having the entire table face deadlock. His solution addressed the issue of computing deadlock, where two or more competing processes infinitely wait for the other to finish.

Dijkstra was an advocate of structured programming and wrote a short research note in the March 1968 edition of the journal Communications of the ACM entitled "The GO TO Considered Harmful," which argued against the complexity of a feature in programming languages like Fortran and Basic that permitted programmers to wri

During his life he shaped the field of computer science like no other scientist. His ground-breaking contributions ranged from the engineering to the theoretical side of computer science. They covered areas such as compiler construction, operating systems, distributed systems, sequential and concurrent programming, software engineering, and graph algorithms. Many of Dijkstra’s papers, often just a few pages long, are the source of new research areas. Indeed, several concepts that are now standard in computer science were first identified by Dijkstra and bear names coined by him.

Dijkstra did not end up becoming a theoretical physicist, thanks to a discussion with Adriaan van Wijngaarden, at that time director of the Mathematisch Centrum’s Computation Department. After working as a programmer at the centre for three years, he knocked on Van Wijngaarden’s door, full of doubt, as he was finding it difficult to combine his role as a programmer and his study in theoretical physics at the Leiden University. ‘When I left his office hours later,’ Dijkstra said in his 1972 ACM Turing Lecture, ‘I was another person.’ Indeed, though programming was not an established discipline yet, Van Wijngaarden managed to convince Dijkstra that ‘it was here to stay’ and that he could play a part in putting the discipline on the map.

Cornerstone of fame: Dijkstra’s algorithm

And put it on the map he did. Dijkstra worked at the Mathematisch Centrum from 1952 to 1962, where he came up with what has become, in his words, ‘one of the cornerstones of my fame’. That cornerstone is the algorithm for the shortest path, also known as Dijkstra’s algorithm. According to Dijkstra, ‘it was a twenty-minute invention’ that he conceived while having a cup of coffee on a café terrace with his fiancée Ria, who he had met at Mathematisch Centrum. He initially used the algorithm in 1956 to showcase the potential of a new computer called ARMAC

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Biography

... she had a great agility in manipulating formulae and a wonderful gift for finding very elegant solutions.

It was a frightening experience: it was the first time that I left the Netherlands, the first time I ever had to understand people speaking English