Edsger W. Dijkstra 1930-2002

"I realized that my previous projects had only been agility exercises. I now had to confront complexity itself and try to find out the best way to do difficult things. But it took me a long time to gather the courage to do that. Alan Turing committed suicide; Kurt Gödel was on and off in a mental hospital. I was terribly frightened.... I was essentially incommunicado, hardly spoke, did not work. I would sit all evening silently staring at the white walls in our living room. Finally, one night at half past two, my wife collected me weeping on the carpet in that room. From that moment I realized that something had to be done." -- Turing Award acceptance speech, 1984