Dijkstra's marriage certificate refused 'programmer' because no such job existed
When Edsger Dijkstra married in 1957 and gave his profession as programmer, Dutch officials rejected it as not a real occupation. He had been the Netherlands' first one since 1952. He went on to devise the famous shortest-path algorithm, build the first ALGOL 60 compiler and win the 1972 Turing Award.
Dijkstra was born in Rotterdam on 11 May 1930 to a chemist father and a mathematician mother. He dreamed of representing his country at the United Nations as a lawyer, but his parents steered him to mathematics and physics at Leiden. Through his supervisor he met Adriaan van Wijngaarden of the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, who hired him in March 1952. For years he split his week between computing and physics, until a long talk with Van Wijngaarden persuaded him programming could become a respectable discipline.
In Amsterdam he wrote software for machines still being built, agreeing the hardware-software interface in a manual first, and learned that careful design can largely replace debugging. For the 1956 inauguration of the ARMAC computer he formulated and solved the shortest path problem, publishing only in 1959 for lack of computing journals. With Jaap Zonneveld he completed the first ALGOL 60 compiler by August 1960, over a year ahead of any rival. His 1959 doctorate described the assembly language of the Electrologica X1.
At Eindhoven from 1962, in a mathematics department that did not quite suit him, he built the THE operating system, whose software-based paged virtual memory shaped later designs. In 1973 he became Burroughs Corporation's only research fellow, working from the study of his home in Nuenen and producing nearly 500 privately circulated EWD reports. He cut his university time to Tuesdays, which became the day of his Tuesday Afternoon Club, a seminar that picked apart papers down to their notation.
In 1984 he took the Schlumberger Centennial Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, where a new branch of the club took root, and retired in 1999. The 1972 Turing Award honoured his work on structured programming. Shortly before he died, a distributed computing award recognised his work on self-stabilisation and was renamed the Dijkstra Prize a year later. After a cancer diagnosis he returned to Nuenen, dying on 6 August 2002.
Source: Edsger W. Dijkstra
