Background
The working vocabulary of programmers everywhere is studded with words originated or forcefully promulgated by E.W. Dijkstra - display, deadly embrace, semaphore, go-to-less programming, structured programming. But his influence on programming is more pervasive than any glossary can possibly indicate. The precious gift that this Turing Award acknowledges is Dijkstra's style: his approach to programming as a high, intellectual challenge; his eloquent insistence and practical demonstration that programs should be composed correctly, not just debugged into correctness; and his illuminating perception of problems at the foundations of program design. He has published about a dozen papers, both technical and reflective, among which are especially to be noted his philosophical address at IFIP, his already classic papers on cooperating sequential processes, and his memorable indictment of the go-to statement. An influential series of letters by Dijkstra have recently surfaced as a polished monograph on the art of composing programs. We have come to value good programs in much the same way as we value good literature. And at the center of this movement, creating and reflecting patters no less beautiful than useful, stands E.W. Dijkstra.

[Extract from the Turing award Citation ready by M.D. McIlroy, chairman of the ACM Turing Award Committee, at the presentatiion of his lecture on August 14, 1972, at the ACM Annual Conference in Boston.]

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (Rotterdam, May 11, 1930 – Nuenen, August 6, 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist.

Dijkstra studied theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. He worked as a research fellow for Burroughs Corporation in the early 1970s. He worked at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and later held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, in the United States. He retired in 2000.

Among his contributions to computer science are the shortest path-algorithm, also known as Dijkstra's algorithm. He received the Turing Award in 1972.

He was also known for his low opinion of the GOTO statement in computer programming, culminating in the 1968 article Go To Statement Considered Harmful (http://www.acm.org/classics/oct95/), regarded as a major step towards the widespread deprecation of the GOTO statement and its effective replacement by control structures such as the while loop. The paper's famous title was not the work of Dijkstra, but of Niklaus Wirth, then editor of Communications of the ACM. Dijkstra was known to be a fan of ALGOL 60, and worked on the team that implemented the first compiler for that language. Dijkstra and Jaap Zonneveld, who collaborated on the compiler, agreed not to shave until the project was completed. Zonneveld eventually shaved off his beard, Dijkstra had kept his ever since.

Since the 1970s, Dijkstra's chief interest was formal verification. The prevailing opinion at the time was that one should first write a program and then provide a mathematical proof of correctness. Dijkstra objected that the resulting proofs are long and cumbersome, and that the proof gives no insight as to how the program was developed. An alternative method is program derivation, to "develop proof and program hand in hand." One starts with a mathematical specification of what a program is supposed to do and applies mathematical transformations to the specification until it is turned into a program that can be executed. The resulting program is then known to be correct by construction. Much of Dijkstra's later work concerns ways to streamline mathematical argument.

Dijkstra was known for his forthright opinions on programming, and for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen. Many of his notes have since been scanned and are available online.

He died on August 6, 2002 after a long struggle with cancer.