E.W.Dijkstra Archive

( photo ©2002 Hamilton Richards ) Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the most influential members of computing science’s founding generation. Among the domains in which his scientific contributions are fundamental are algorithm design programming languages program design operating systems distributed processing formal specification and verification design of mathematical arguments In addition, Dijkstra was intensely interested in teaching, and in the relationships between academic computing science and the software industry. During his forty-plus years as a computing scientist, which included positions in both academia and industry, Dijkstra’s contributions brought him many prizes and awards, including computing science’s highest honor, the ACM Turing Award. The Manuscripts Like most of us, Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands. Although most of Dijkstra’s publications began life as EWD manuscripts, the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished. They have been inaccessible to many potential readers, and those who have received copies have been unable to cite them in their own work. To alleviate both of these problems, the department has collected over a thousand of the manuscripts in this permanent web site, in the form of PDF bitmap documents (to read them, you’ll need a copy of Acrobat Reader ). We hope you will find it convenient, useful, inspiring, and enjoyable. The original manuscripts, along with diaries, correspondence, photographs, and other papers, are housed at The Center for American History of The University of Texas at Austin. Indexes Each manuscript file is accessible through either of two indexes: 0. BibTeX index. Each entry includes all the available bibliographic data. 1. Ad-hoc indexes. These contain titles only, but are faster if you know what you’re looking for. EWD-numbered documents (This index gives an approximate correspondence between manuscripts’ EWD numbers and the year in which they appeared.) Technical reports from the Mathematical Centre (now CWI: Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica) PhD thesis (5.3 MB) Other documents You can find a table relating EWD numbers to publication years here . Many of the privately circulated manuscripts collected here were subsequently published; their copyrights are held by their respective publishers. Transcripts and translations A growing number of the PDF bitmap documents have been transcribed to make them searchable and accessible to visitors who are visually impaired. A few of the manuscripts written in Dutch have been translated into English, and one -EWD1036- has been translated into Spanish . EWD28 has been translated from English into Russian . For these transcriptions and translations we are grateful to over sixty contributors . Volunteers willing to transcribe manuscripts...

Preview: ~500 words