Dijkstra Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 – August 6, 2002; was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 A. M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions in the area of programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000. Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work in the subarea of self-stabilization. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honour. Legacy The title of his 1972 book "Structured Programming", coauthored with Charles Anthony Richard Hoare and Ole-Johan Dahl, became the term used to describe a major style of programming in computer software. As a college professor, Edsger Dijkstra's legacy is difficult to determine, considering his effect on numerous college students and technical publications. He is remembered by some as a troubling figure. Many of his writings offended people, although not by name but instead by description in such a way that other computer scientists saw themselves characterised as anti-intellectual time-servers enslaved by major corporations, and these computer scientists naturally took umbrage at what seemed to be literary and essayistic hyperbole. Some of his work remains cutting edge to this day, notably on multiprocessing. At other times he seems to have pursued pure mathematics without being a member of the rather close-knit international mathematical fraternity and may as a result have been the first to discover fascinating and elegant new proofs of things already known. Here, the warnings of his family and university teachers may have had some validity; they felt that by wanting to be a computer programmer and not a professor of mathematics, Dijkstra was violating a family and social tradition for a tradesman's occupation, and indeed Dijkstra returned to academic life with apparent relief after encountering corporate thinking.