// 05 · Origin story
Named after Edsger Dijkstra, who solved this in 1956.
In 1956, a Dutch programmer sat in an Amsterdam café and worked out — in twenty minutes, by hand — the shortest path between two cities. He called it Algorithm 97. The world calls it Dijkstra's algorithm.
DEXTRA — D-E-X-tra — is the algorithm, plus the extra: traffic, time windows, fuel, capacity, drivers' lunch breaks. Everything Edsger left out, because he wasn't routing trucks across Kazakhstan in February.
"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."— E. W. Dijkstra, 1975
We borrowed his graph. We added everything else. The result is a TMS that thinks like a mathematician, dispatches like a dispatcher, and looks — deliberately — like a 1986 arcade.
EDSGER · 1930–2002 · ARCHIVE PHOTO