We heard yesterday that Maurice Herlihy's paper on 'wait-free synchronization'is the 2003 winner of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is given to an outstanding paper on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade.

In this paper Herlihy developed a beautiful and useful theory of fault-tolerant computation in distributed systems where asynchronous processes communicate by accessing shared objects of arbitrary type. He showed that objects of different type can ...