Brian Kernighan: Biography, Facts and Career

Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born 30 January 1942) 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"). 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. In 2015, he co-authored the book The Go Programming Language.

Quick facts about Brian Kernighan

• Full name: Brian Kernighan
• Born: 1942-01-01
• Nationality: Canada
• Known as: Author
• Wikidata ID: Q92608

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