Theodorus Dekker

Theodorus Jozef Dekker, known as Dirk Dekker, was a Dutch mathematician who lived from 1 March 1927 to 25 November 2021. He completed his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam in 1958 with a thesis titled Paradoxical Decompositions of Sets and Spaces. In computing he is remembered for Dekker's algorithm, which lets two processes share a single-use resource without conflict while communicating only through shared memory. The algorithm is regarded as the first known correct solution to the mutual exclusion problem in concurrent programming, and Edsger Dijkstra attributed it to him in an unpublished paper on sequential process descriptions and in his manuscript on cooperating sequential processes.