Brian Kernighan
Country:
Canada
Brian Wilson Kernighan (/ˈkɜːrnɪhæn/; born January 30, 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). He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. Kernighan 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 Profess