The academic study of concurrent computing started in the 1960s, with Dijkstra (1965) credited with being the first paper in this field, identifying and solving the mutual exclusion problem. He was also one of the early pioneers of the research on principles of distributed computing. His foundational work on concurrency, semaphores, mutual exclusion, deadlock (deadly embrace), finding shortest paths in graphs, fault-tolerance, self-stabilization, among many other contributions comprises many of the pillars upon which the field of distributed computing is built. Shortly before his death in 2002, he received the ACM PODC Influential-Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize (Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing) the following year. As the prize, sponsored jointly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), recognizes that "No other individual has had a larger influence on research in principles of distributed computing".