Though Dijkstra's own research publications were cited a lot, he himself did not want to judge the quality of one's work in terms of number of citations, nor in terms of number of papers.

Wirth and Dijkstra were close colleagues, thoroughly studying each other's writings in 1971. But how close, exactly, were they? How did Wirth's views differ from those of Dijkstra? In my first attempt to address these matters, I shall discuss a letter Wirth sent to Dijkstra in March 1971.

In a letter to Nils J. Nilsson, Dijkstra expressed his misgivings about research in artificial intelligence (AI). Only automatic theorem proving deserved his appraisal. (EWD778)

Given a specific function, called lambo, how do you prove that it is equal to its own inverse? Dijkstra's answer: by massaging a program that computes lambo. That is, by gradually transforming an original program that computes lambo into a symmetric program that is rather useless to the programmer but useful to the mathematician!