- 1930-2002. Dutch computer scientist.
- Invented Dijkstra’s algorithm for shortest paths in graph theory, foundational to routing and network search.
- Pioneered structured programming, advocating clarity and provability over ad-hoc coding.
- Made foundational contributions to distributed systems, concurrency, and mutual exclusion (the dining philosophers problem).
- Advanced formal methods and program verification, treating software construction as mathematical proof.
- His shortest-path algorithm is a core primitive in knowledge graph traversal, network routing, and cyber link ranking.
- Advocated that computer science is a branch of mathematics, with programs as formal objects amenable to rigorous reasoning.