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Edsger W. Dijkstra was a computer scientist whose work includes the Dijkstra algorithm for shortest paths with nonnegative edge weights. Its key step finalizes the unsettled vertex with the smallest tentative distance; nonnegative edge weights ensure that a later route cannot improve that distance.^[ref]

The same short paper also treated the minimum spanning tree problem. The distinction is instructive: minimizing the total weight of a connecting tree differs from minimizing routes from a source. Dijkstra later recalled devising the shortest-path example for a 1956 computer demonstration using a simplified Dutch railway map, a concrete explanation of the computational task for a general audience.^[ref]