Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 A. M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions in the area of programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.

Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential Paper Award in distributed computing for his work in the subarea of self-stabilization. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize the following year, in his honour.