Two great people passed away recently. The frivolous mass media did not widely report on them, as they prefer to fawn on “celebrities”, but each of them had a more significant and fundamental influence on our world than any two-bit actor or airhead princess ever will.

Laurent Schwartz, a French mathematician, did rate an obituary in Le Monde, mostly because of his courageous struggle against France’s colonial war of oppression in Algeria. He is the inventor of the theory of distributions, which extends ordinary functions to cope with things such as the Dirac delta “function”. It is a cornerstone of modern mathematical analysis and is used in signal analysis, itself the cornerstone of the technologies used to transmit data over analog media such as DSL.

Edsger Dijkstra, best known as the curmudgeonly Dutchman who advocated banning the goto statement, was a pioneering computer scientist who invented, among his many contributions, the algorithm which bears his name to find the shortest path in a graph and which is the basis for routing in the Internet.

You wouldn’t be able to read this page without these mens’ work.