Vicki Almstrum
The University of Texas at Austin
March 1, 2006
Interviewed by Mary Last
Mary Hardin Baylor University
Recorded i Houston Texas
Segment length 5minutes, 3.2 mb
File name AlmstrumSpeaksDijkstra.mp3
M: This is an interview with Vicki Almstrum from University of
Texas at Austin conducted by Mary Last. This interview is being
recorded on March 1st, 2006, at Houston, Texas. It is part of the
Computer Education Oral History Series. Did we pronounce your name
right, did I pronounce it right?
V: Almstrum.
M: You had some interesting mentors in your life and you had some
interesting friendships with people who are giants in the field –
Edgster Dijkstra and I know I am not saying that right. So how do you
say that?
V: Edgster W. Dijkstra – Dijkstra.
M: Could you speak about how he influenced your life as a mentor
or in teaching?
V: It’s interesting. I’ll get tearful because I think back
to when I first started at UT and not wanting to take his class because
I thought, I’m not worthy and then finally getting the courage to take
it and being so happy and so comfortable because he always had small
classes, no more than about 18 students and they were so
personal. He always started class with a quote, just something
odd and interesting and I always kept in my notes all of the different
quotes that he had over the years. And in one of the booklets we
put together to honor him several of us collected some of our favorites
of those.
I’ll never forget one time a particularly interesting theorem that he
put up and he asked always for different approaches and I came up with
an approach that was different. He usually no sandals on.
He would be in his stocking feet and shorts and his bolo tie. He
would pace back and forth and rub his goatee and think and so he
stopped and thought about this one and says, “I’ve never thought of
that; that’s really interesting.” And just sort of a feeling of
pride. It was incredible.
And just being touched over the years that he would come and talk to my
software engineering classes. He did one of his EWDs, answering
questions that my students had given and so it’s neat to have
that as part of his legacy.
Being invited to private celebrations of his birthday then after
getting to know him after a few years was very touching. And in
fact one of the things I am missing this weekend by being here in
Houston is getting to see his wife when she is going to be in Austin
over the weekend.
So it just ... it was an amazing experience to see him in action
teaching, to be part of his Tuesday afternoon club and be sitting ...
M: {interrupts} What’s Tuesday afternoon?
A: Tuesday afternoon club he started in Eindhoven and so
Eindhoven continued with this.
M: {interrupts} What’s Eindhoven?
A: Eindhoven is in the Netherlands. This is the University he was
at. So just a little background about Edgster is that he was very
discouraged in his years at Eindhoven because he was such a visionary
and he was in a department of mathematicians. And the things that
he was talking about computing – it’s just going to go away, it’s
nothing interesting. And so he felt very alone, very
isolated. So in the late sixties as some of the activities
started with the software engineering conferences in Germany and in
Rome in ’68 and ’69 and beginning to build his collection of colleagues
and friends, he went through a horrible depression and brought himself
out of it in part by writing his treatise on structured programming and
to understand the process that he had gone through and to appreciate
all of that was amazing.
So in Eindhoven in order to build his support structure, he started his
Tuesday afternoon club. It was Tuesday afternoons, hence the
reason for the name. And they would read articles together. And I
don’t mean just you read an article and come and discuss it. I
mean you read line by line through the article and so he continued this
into Austin and I was invited to join in. Walt Potter from
Southwestern often participated, graduate students, some faculty
members, and it would be a little bit of social, a lot of looking at
these articles carefully and just on a row by row basis, talking about
the ideas, the language that was used to express it, the word choices,
looking at the theorems, looking at the proofs. Following through
them, every line in order to say” OK, what’s the logic here? Does
it have the elegance it should?” These are important themes
that would come back time after time.
M: And they influenced you?
V: Yes.