"I asked my mother [a mathematician] whether mathematics was a difficult topic. She said to be sure to learn all the formulas and be sure you know them. The second thing to remember is if you need more than five lines to prove something, then you're on the wrong track."
- Edsger Dijkstra
A very refreshing perspective on the field of computer science comes to us from a Dutch man named
Edsger W. Dijkstra, born in Rotterdam in 1930. A graduate of the Gymnasium Erasminium, an elite traditional-education high school, and an alumnus of the University of Leiden, where he pursued a degree in theoretical physics, Dijkstra had always had a radical and very rigorous approach to mathematics and eventually computer science. His work on the shortest path problem and the dining philosophers problem shows exactly that. The most admirable thing however is that he did his work - and advocated for the discipline of computer science - when computer science, certainly not its theoretically-demanding aspects, did not yet exist, or at least were not recognized within the scientific community at that point in time. He is "the creative scientist whose love of good problems and enduring solutions have made enormous contribution to the science and practice of computing," and from his point of view, we should take some advice, which Dijkstra himself put into "three golden rules[:]
- Never compete with colleagues.
- Try the most difficult thing you can do.
- Choose what is scientifically healthy and relevant. Don't compromise on scientific integrity."
and never lose sight of the goal (67).
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