SMRTR ProgrammingMay 12, 2026Reddit

Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation

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Dennis Ritchie's 1968 doctoral dissertation — lost for over 50 years — has been recovered and published publicly for the first time. Ritchie never received his PhD simply because he refused to pay the library binding fee. His dissertation introduced "loop programs," an elegant model for computational complexity that directly connected to Gödel's recursive functions and laid groundwork for theoretical computer science.

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