The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders

Edsger Dijkstra, a pioneering computer scientist, shaped the emerging field so widely that he was probably its most discussed scientist in the 1970s and 1980s, yet he remained largely unknown outside computer science. From 1959 to 2002 he wrote 1,318 numbered private reports, known as EWDs, totaling over 7,700 pages, with around 20 copies of each distributed by mail. His shortest path algorithm, published in Numerische Mathematik, remains one of the most highly cited papers in computer science, and with Jaap Zonneveld he wrote the first ALGOL 60 compiler.