Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

In Memoriam: Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin, died of cancer on 6 August 2002 at his home in Nuenen, the Netherlands. Dijkstra was a towering figure whose scientific contributions permeate major domains of computer science. He was a thinker, scholar, and teacher in renaissance style: working alone or in a close-knit group o...

In Memoriam: Edsger W. Dijkstra

Edsger W . Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

In 1985 Fischer, Lynch, and Paterson (FLP) proved that consensus is not attainable in asynchronous message passing systems with failures. In the following years, Loui and Abu-Amara, and Herlihy proved that solving consensus in an asynchronous shared memory system is harder than implementing a read/write register. However, it was not known whether read/ write registers are implementable in async...

The 2010 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

The ACM-EATCS Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing was created to acknowledge outstanding papers on the principles of distributed computing whose significance and impact on the theory or practice of distributed computing have been evident for at least a decade. The Prize is sponsored jointly by the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the EATCS Symposium ...

User-Centered Design Considered Harmful (with apologies to Edsger Dijkstra, Niklaus Wirth, and Don Norman)

Studies of IT for development have often identiaed the importance of the usability of IT systems and the need for IT systems to be matched to the needs of host communities. These two issues are central concerns for the discipline of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), or Interaction Design. Within HCI and Interaction Design, user-centered design is just one particular view on how design processes...