Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

: first years in the computing science (1951-1968)

Abstract

History is often considered as a useless occupation, which conveys nothing other than a knowledge of the past. This is especially true for the history of sciences : a scientific curriculum does usually not comprise a single course on the history of the sciece concerned. We will try, in this work, to see if an in depth study of the achievements and writings of an important author in a discipline can help us to gain a better understanding of the discipline itself. The chosen discipline is the computing science, and the author is Djikstra. We ristrict our study to the first two decades of his life as a programmer.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Wim Vanhoof (Supervisor) & Baudouin LE CHARLIER (Co-Supervisor)