https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/welcome.html
E. W. Dijkstra Archive
the manuscripts of
Edsger W. Dijkstra
1930 2002
Search EWDs:
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| Photo of Edsger W. |
Numerical | Dijkstra(photo (c)2002 Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the most influential |
EWD Index: | Hamilton Richards) members of computing science's founding generation. Among |
00xx | the domains in which his scientific contributions are |
01xx | fundamental are |
02xx | |
03xx | * algorithm design |
04xx | * programming languages |
05xx | * program design |
06xx | * operating systems |
07xx | * distributed processing |
08xx | * formal specification and verification |
09xx | * design of mathematical arguments |
10xx | |
11xx | In addition, Dijkstra was intensely interested in |
12xx | teaching, and in the relationships between academic |
13xx | computing science and the software industry. |
| |
BibTeX index | During his forty-plus years as a computing scientist, |
| which included positions in both academia and industry, |
MC Reports | Dijkstra's contributions brought him many prizes and |
| awards, including computing science's highest honor, the |
Other documents | ACM Turing Award. |
| |
Transcriptions | --------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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Video and Audio | The Manuscripts |
| |
External links | 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| unpublished.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 are |
| always welcome (Note: doing EWDs justice in translation has turned |
| out to be too difficult, so we are no longer soliciting |
| translations). |
| |
| Proofreading Each transcription gets a cursory scan as it's prepared |
| for uploading, but since a web page can always be updated, I don't |
| strive for (unattainable) perfection before installing it. On the |
| web, proofreading is a game that can be played by every reader; if |
| you spot an error, please |
| |
| archive -at- ewdijkstra.net |
| |
| Links between EWDs |
| |
| A compilation of cross-references has been contributed by Diethard |
| Michaelis. As its author notes, the collection is incomplete, and all |
| readers are invited to add to it. |
| |
| Dijkstra often returned to topics about which he had already written, |
| when he had something new to say or even just a better way of saying |
| it. When Dijkstra himself didn't provide the backward references, we |
| indicate the relationship by "see also" links in the index, leaving |
| the judgment of the extent to which the earlier EWD is superseded by |
| the later one to the reader. Any reader who notices such a |
| relationship is invited to |
| |
| archive -at- ewdijkstra.net |
| |
| Summaries |
| |
| We have begun adding summaries of the EWDs. This innovation was |
| suggested by Gunter Rote, who contributed the first dozen summaries. |
| Additional contributions of summaries especially summaries in English |
| of EWDs in Dutch are most welcome. |
| |
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| Copyrights |
| |
| Copyrights in most EWDs are held by his children, one of whom -- -- |
| handles requests for permission to publish reproductions. The |
| exceptions are documents that were published, and whose copyrights |
| are held by their publishers; those documents are listed here, and |
| each one is provided with a cover page identifying the copyright |
| holder. |
| |
| Because the original manuscripts are in possession of the Briscoe |
| Center for American History at The University of Texas, the Center's |
| policies are also applicable. |
| |
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| |
| Video and audio |
| |
| In addition to the manuscripts, you may enjoy some recordings of |
| Dijkstra lectures and interviews. |
| |
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| |
| About Dijkstra and his work |
| |
| An interview with Dijkstra (Spanish translation here) was conducted |
| in 1985 by Rogier F. van Vlissingen, who has also written a personal |
| reflection on "Dijkstra's sense of what computer science and |
| programming are and what they aren't." |
| |
| Another interview was conducted by Philip L. Frana in August 2001. A |
| transcript is available in the on-line collection of the Charles |
| Babbage Institute. |
| |
| To mark the occasion of Dijkstra's retirement in November 1999 from |
| the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computer Sciences, which he had |
| occupied since 1984, and to celebrate his forty-plus years of seminal |
| contributions to computing science, the Department of Computer |
| Sciences organized a symposium, In Pursuit of Simplicity, which took |
| place on his birthday in May 2000. The symposium's program (10 MB) |
| contains an outline of Dijkstra's career, as well as a collection of |
| quotes culled from his writings, from his blackboard, and from what |
| others have said about him. Banquet speeches by David Gries, Fred |
| Schneider, Krzysztof Apt, W.M. Turski, and H. Richards were recorded |
| on a video. |
| |
| Dijkstra's death in August 2002 was marked by many obituaries and |
| memorials, including the Computer Sciences department's memorial |
| celebration. |
| |
| A remembrance of Dijkstra was posted in May 2008 by Maarten van Emden |
| (thanks to Tristram Brelstaff for noting it). |
| |
| In 2021 Krzysztof R. Apt and Tony Hoare edited a commemoration of |
| Edsger Dijkstra written by more than twenty computer scientists who |
| knew him as a colleague, teacher, and friend. |
| |
| A blog devoted to Dijkstra s works and thoughts has been created, and |
| is being maintained, by the historian of computing Edgar G. Daylight. |
| An article by Daylight, Dijkstra's Rallying Cry for Generalization: |
| the Advent of the Recursive Procedure, late 1950s - early 1960s, |
| appeared in The Computer Journal, March 2011. |
| |
| In his blog A Programmer s Place, Maarten van Emden has an entry |
| entitled Another scoop by Dijkstra? . The entry describes Dijkstra s |
| remarkable insight [in Notes on Structured Programming (EWD 249)] |
| that resolves the stand-off between the Sieve of Eratosthenes |
| (efficient in terms of time, but not memory) and the method of Trial |
| Division (efficient in terms of memory, but not time) by applying the |
| Assembly-line Principle. |
| |
| The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing honors |
| Dijkstra's "foundational work on concurrency primitives (such as the |
| semaphore), concurrency problems (such as mutual exclusion and |
| deadlock), reasoning about concurrent systems, and self-stabilization |
| [, which] comprises one of the most important supports upon which the |
| field of distributed computing is built." |
| |
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| The Dijkstra Memorial Lectures |
| |
| A series of annual lectures in memory of Dijkstra commenced at The |
| University of Texas in October 2010. |
| |
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| |
| About this site |
| |
| Recent significant changes in the site are listed here; the most |
| recent change was posted on 30 March 2021. |
| |
| The folks who contributed most significantly to the site's creation |
| are acknowledged here. |
| |
| Comments and suggestions about the site are always welcome; please |
| email them to the |
| |
| archive -at- ewdijkstra.net |
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| Related site |
| |
| If you find this site interesting, you may also be interested in |
| another site: |
| |
| Discipline in Thought which is a website dedicated to disciplined |
| thinking, calculational mathematics, and mathematical |
| methodology. The members of this site are markedly influenced by |
| the works of EWD, and the material shared through the website |
| continues in the traditions set by EWD (among others). |
| |
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| Revised 2020-01-12 |
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