Brian Kernighan
Canadian computer scientist / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Brian Wilson Kernighan (/ˈkɜːrnɪhæn/;[5][6] born January 30, 1942)[1] is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language (The C Programming Language) with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language ("it's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work").[7]
Brian Kernighan | |
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Born | Brian Wilson Kernighan (1942-01-30) January 30, 1942 (age 82)[1][2] |
Nationality | Canadian |
Citizenship | Canada |
Alma mater | University of Toronto (BASc) Princeton University (PhD) |
Known for | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science |
Institutions | Princeton University |
Thesis | Some Graph Partitioning Problems Related to Program Segmentation (1969) |
Doctoral advisor | Peter Weiner[4] |
Website | www |
Kernighan authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. He is coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and of AWK both stand for "Kernighan".
In collaboration with Shen Lin he devised well-known heuristics for two NP-complete optimization problems: graph partitioning and the travelling salesman problem. In a display of authorial equity, the former is usually called the Kernighan–Lin algorithm, while the latter is known as the Lin–Kernighan heuristic.
Kernighan has been a professor of computer science at Princeton University since 2000 and is the director of undergraduate studies in the department of computer science.[8][9][10] In 2015, he co-authored the book The Go Programming Language.