Too me a while to figure out it was on Medium, but there is some good stuff there. Nice to remember Dijkstra after a while...

So the story gives me the excuse to share my favorite Dijkstra anecdotes. Keeping it to the top three.

(1) I was at UT when he arrived. The story that went around the department was that he visited all of the graduate students and individually criticized their research. Not in a hostile way, but still...

(2) In response to a question (possibly mine) he said that he developed new ideas in either of his languages, but the next step was to try to translate each idea into the other language. If there were difficulties in the translation, then he regarded it as evidence the new idea was flawed.

(3) In regards to another question (more likely mine), he offered a perceptive observation about Japan. But on reflection of my own years in Japan, I'm pretty sure his input data was flawed. Yes, ritual is important, but I'd bet he saw different people in the same costumes.

He didn't have to talk to regular folks at that stage of his career, but he was a great teacher and wanted to. That's how I got to hear him speak a time or three, though I was never lucky enough to have an actual course taught by him.