Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective

Since the summer of 1973, when I became a Burroughs Research Fellow, my life has been very different from what it had been before. The daily routine changed: instead of going to the University each day, where I used to spend most of my time in the company of others, I now went there only one day a week and was most of the time -that is, when not travelling!- alone in my study. In my solitude, mail and the written word in general became more and more important. The circumstance that my employer and I had the Atlantic Ocean between us was a further incentive to keep a fairly complete record of what I was doing. The public part of that output found its place in what became known as "the EWD series", which can be viewed as a form of scientific correspondence, possible since the advent of the copier. (That same copier makes it hard to estimate its actual distribution: I myself made about two dozen copies of my texts, but their recipients were welcome to act as further nodes of the distribution tree. ) The decision to publish a se1ection from the EWD series in book form was at first highly embarrassing, but as the months went by I got used to the idea. As soon as some guiding principles had been adopted -preferably not published elsewhere, as varied and as representative as possible, etc.

EWD227 Stepwise Program Construction.- EWD338 Parallelism in Multi-Record Transactions (Co-author: C. S. Scholten).- EWD376 Finding the Maximum Strong Components in a Directed Graph.- EWD385 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, Summer School Munich, July 25 to August 4, 1973.- EWD386 The Solution to a Cyclic Relaxation Problem.- EWD387 Trip Report IBM Seminar “Communication and Computers”, Newcastle, Sept. 1973.- EWD391 Self-Stabilization in Spite of Distributed Control.- EWD407 Acceptance Speech for the AFIPS Harry Goode Memorial Award 1974.- EWD427 Speech at the Occasion of an Anniversary.- EWD442 Inside “Mathematics Inc.”.- EWD443 A Multidisciplinary Approach to Mathematics.- EWD447 On the Role of Scientific Thought.- EWD462 A Time-Wise Hierarchy Imposed upon the Use of a Two-Level Store.- EWD464 A New Elephant Built from Mosquitoes Humming in Harmony.- EWD465 Monotonic Replacement Algorithms and Their Implementation.- EWD466 Trip Report E.W. Dijkstra, Meeting IFIP W.G.2.3., Munich, 8–14 December 1974.- EWD474 Trip Report Visit ETH Zurich, 3–4 February 1975 by E.W. Dijkstra.- EWD475 A Letter to My Old Friend Jonathan.- EWD480 “Craftsman or Scientist?”.- EWD482 Exercises in Making Programs Robust.- EWD494 Trip Report E.W. Dijkstra 16th April/7th May, 1975, U.S.A. and Canada.- EWD498 How Do We Tell Truths that Might Hurt?.- EWD501 Variations on a Theme: An Open Letter to C. A. R. Hoare.- EWD503 A Post-Scriptum to EWD501.- EWD504 Erratum and Embellishments of EWD503.- EWD508 A Synthesis Emerging?.- EWD512 Comments at a Symposium.- EWD513 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, Newcastle, 8–12 September 1975.- EWD525 On a Warning from E. A. Hauck.- EWD528 More on Hauck’s Warning.- EWD538 A Collection of Beautiful Proofs.- EWD539 Mathematics Inc., a Private Letter from Its Chairman.- EWD554 A Personal Summary of the Gries-Owicki Theory.- EWD561 A “Non Trip Report” from E. W. Dijkstra.- EWD563 Formal Techniques and Sizeable Programs.- EWD570 An Exercise for Dr. R. M. Burstall.- EWD573 A Great Improvement.- EWD575 To H. D. Mills, Chairman Software Methodology Panel.- EWD576 On Subgoal Induction.- EWD577 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, ECI-Conferenee 9–12 August 1976, Amsterdam.- EWD578 More About the Function “fusc” (A Sequel to EWD570).- EWD582 A Proof of a Theorem Communicated to Us by S. Ghosh.- EWD584 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, Poland and USSR, 4–25 September 1976.- EWD585 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, Tokyo, 28 Sept.–3 Oct. 1976.- EWD594 A Parable.- EWD603 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, St. Pierre-de-Chartreuse, 12–19 Dec. 1976.- EWD607 A Correctness Proof for Communicating Processes: A Small Exercise.- EWD608 An Elephant Inspired by the Dutch National Flag.- EWD611 On the Fact that the Atlantic Ocean Has Two Sides.- EWD613 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, Australia, 16 February 1977–21 March 1977.- EWD614 A Somewhat Open Letter to EAA or: Why I Proved the Boundedness of the Nondeterminacy in the Way I Did.- EWD618 On Webster, Users, Bugs, and Aristotle.- EWD622 On Making Solutions More and More Fine-Grained.- EWD623 The Mathematics Behind the Banker’s Algorithm.- EWD629 On Two Beautiful Solutions Designed by Martin Rem.- EWD635 Trip Report E. W. Dijkstra, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 5–10 Sept. 1977.- EWD636 Why Naive Program Transformation Systems Are Unlikely to Work.- EWD637 The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research.- EWD639 The Introduction of MAES®.- EWD643 A Class of Simple Communication Patterns.- EWD648 “Why Is Software So Expensive?” An Explanation to the Hardware Designer.- EWD650 A Theorem About Odd Powers of Odd Integers.- EWD671 Program Inversion.- EWD673 On Weak and Strong Termination.- EWD675 The Equivalence of Bounded Nondeterminacy and Continuity.- EWD678 A Story that Starts with a Very Good Computer.