Editing Edsger W. Dijkstra (section)

===Early years===
Edsger W. Dijkstra was born in [[Rotterdam]].  His father was a chemist who was president of the [[Dutch Chemical Society]]; he taught chemistry at a secondary school and was later its superintendent. His mother was a mathematician, but never had a formal job.<ref>{{cite web |title=Edsger Wybe Dijkstra |website=Stichting Digidome|date=3 September 2003 |url=http://www.digidome.nl/edsger_wybe_dijkstra.htm |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20041206193322/http://www.digidome.nl/edsger_wybe_dijkstra.htm |archive-date=6 December 2004}}</ref><ref name=MacTutor.bio>{{cite web| title=Dijkstra biography |last1=O'Connor |first1=J. J. |last2=Robertson |first2=E. F. |website=MacTutor |publisher=School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland |date=July 2008 |url=http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Dijkstra.html |access-date=18 January 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131011055811/http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Dijkstra.html |archive-date=11 October 2013 |url-status=live}}</ref>

Dijkstra had considered a career in law and had hoped to represent the Netherlands in the [[United Nations]]. However, after graduating from school in 1948, at his parents' suggestion he studied mathematics and physics and then [[theoretical physics]] at the [[University of Leiden]].<ref name="Dijkstra_bio">{{cite web |last1=Faulkner |first1=Larry R. |last2=Durbin |first2=John R. |date=19 August 2013 |title=In Memoriam: Edsger Wybe Dijkstra |url=https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/MemRes(USLtr).pdf |access-date=20 August 2015 |publisher=University of Texas at Austin}}</ref>

In the early 1950s, [[electronic computers]] were a novelty. Dijkstra stumbled on his career by accident, and through his supervisor, Professor {{Interlanguage link|Johannes Haantjes|nl}}, he met [[Adriaan van Wijngaarden]], the director of the Computation Department at the [[Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica|Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam]], who offered Dijkstra a job; he officially became the Netherlands' first "programmer" in March 1952.<ref name="Dijkstra_bio"/>

Dijkstra remained committed to physics for some time, working on it in [[Leiden]] three days out of each week. With increasing exposure to computing, however, his focus began to shift. As he recalled:<ref name="ewd340">{{cite web |last=Dijkstra |first=Edsger W. |year=1972 |title=The Humble Programmer |work=ACM Turing Lecture 1972 |id=EWD340 |url=http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html}}</ref>

{{ blockquote
| text = After having programmed for some three years, I had a discussion with A. van Wijngaarden, who was then my boss at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, a discussion for which I shall remain grateful to him as long as I live. The point was that I was supposed to study theoretical physics at the University of Leiden simultaneously, and as I found the two activities harder and harder to combine, I had to make up my mind, either to stop programming and become a real, respectable theoretical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to a formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become....., yes what? A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? For after all, what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed. Full of misgivings I knocked on Van Wijngaarden's office door, asking him whether I could "speak to him for a moment"; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could.
| author=Edsger Dijkstra|title=The Humble Programmer (EWD340)|source=[[Communications of the ACM]]
}}

When Dijkstra married Maria "Ria" C. Debets in 1957, he was required as a part of the marriage rites to state his profession. He stated that he was a programmer, which was unacceptable to the authorities, there being no such profession then in The Netherlands.<ref name="ewd340"/><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/144-dijkstra.html |author=James, Mike |title=Edsger Dijkstra — The Poetry of Programming |publisher=i-programmer.info |date=1 May 2013 |access-date=12 August 2015}}</ref>
 
In 1959, he received his PhD from the [[University of Amsterdam]] for a thesis entitled 'Communication with an Automatic Computer',<ref>{{cite web|url=https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/23612 |author=Dijkstra, Edsger Wiebe |title=Communication with an automatic computer |publisher=Uitgeverij Excelsior/CWI |date=28 October 1959 |access-date=4 November 2022}}</ref> devoted to a description of the [[assembly language]] designed for the first commercial computer developed in the Netherlands, the [[Electrologica X1]]. His thesis supervisor was Van Wijngaarden.<ref name="Apt, Krzysztof R. 2002">
{{cite journal |last=Apt |first=Krzysztof R. |year=2002 |title=Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930 - 2002): A portrait of a genius |journal=Formal Aspects of Computing |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=92–98 |arxiv=cs/0210001 |doi=10.1007/s001650200029 |s2cid=12482128 |doi-access=free}}</ref>