E. W. Dijkstra Archive the manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra 1930-2002.
From the webpage:
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was one of the most influential members of computing science’s founding generation. Among the domains in which his scientific contributions are fundamental are
- algorithm design
- programming languages
- program design
- operating systems
- distributed processing
- formal specification and verification
- design of mathematical arguments
In addition, Dijkstra was intensely interested in teaching, and in the relationships between academic computing science and the software industry.
During his forty-plus years as a computing scientist, which included positions in both academia and industry, Dijkstra’s contributions brought him many prizes and awards, including computing science’s highest honor, the ACM Turing Award.
The Manuscripts
Like most of us, Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands.
Although most of Dijkstra’s publications began life as EWD manuscripts, the great majority of his manuscripts remain unpublished. They have been inaccessible to many potential readers, and those who have received copies have been unable to cite them in their own work. To alleviate both of these problems, the department has collected over a thousand of the manuscripts in this permanent web site, in the form of PDF bitmap documents (to read them, you’ll need a copy of Acrobat Reader). We hope you will find it convenient, useful, inspiring, and enjoyable.
What an awesome collection of materials!
In addition to images of the manuscripts, there are numerous links to other resources that will be of interest.
Ignore the “…most recent change was posted on 5 April 2008” notice on the homepage. If you look at changes to the site, the most recent updates were 20 June 2013, so it is still an active project.
I first saw this in a tweet by Computer Science.