Brian Wilson Kernighan (IPA pronunciation: ['kɛrnɪˌhæn], the 'g' is silent), (born 1942 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed greatly to Unix and its school of thought. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. Not to be confused with the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... 1942 (MCMXLII) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1942 calendar). ... Motto: Ut Incepit Fidelis Sic Permanet (Latin: Loyal she began, loyal she remains) Capital Toronto Largest city Toronto Official languages English Government - Lieutenant-Governor James K. Bartleman - Premier Dalton McGuinty (Liberal) Federal representation in Canadian Parliament - House seats 106 - Senate seats 24 Confederation July 1, 1867 (1st) Area Ranked 4th... Computer science (informally: CS or compsci) is, in its most general sense, the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. ... Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) was the main research and development arm of the United States Bell System. ... Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply Ken in hacker circles), is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding the UNIX and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems. ... Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. ... AWK is a general purpose computer language that is designed for processing text-based data, either in files or data streams. ... AMPL, short for A Mathematical Programming Language, is a high-level programming language, developed at Bell Laboratories, for describing and solving high complexity problems for large scale mathematical computation (i. ... A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ...

Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan has said 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. C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... Filiation of Unix and Unix-like systems Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX®) is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... Ditroff is the device independent version of the troff text formatter. ...

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 styled Lin-Kernighan.) In complexity theory, the NP-complete problems are the most difficult problems in NP, in the sense that they are the ones most likely not to be in P. The reason is that if you could find a way to solve an NP-complete problem quickly, then you could use... If a salesman starts at point A, and if the distances between any two points is known, what is the shortest round-trip the salesman can make which will visit all points once and return to point A? The travelling salesman problem[1] [2](TSP) is a problem in discrete... In optimization, the Lin-Kernighan algorithm is one of the best heuristics for the Euclidean traveling salesman problem. ... In optimization, the Lin-Kernighan algorithm is one of the best heuristics for the Euclidean traveling salesman problem. ...

Kernighan was also software editor for Prentice-Hall International. His Software Tools series spread the essence of 'C/Unix thinking' with makeovers for BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal - and most notably his 'Ratfor' (rational FORTRAN) was put in the public domain.

He has said that if stranded on an island with only one programming language it would have to be C.

The 'K' of K&R C and the 'K' in AWK stand for 'Kernighan'. The C Programming Language, second edition, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, widely regarded to be the authoritative reference on C. The C Programming Language (sometimes referred to as K&R) is a well-known computer science book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally... AWK is a general purpose computer language that is designed for processing text-based data, either in files or data streams. ...

He received his Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University, where he has held a professorship in the department of computer science since 2000. A bachelors degree (Artium Baccalaureus, A.B. or B.A.) is usually an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course or major that generally lasts for three, four, or in some cases and countries, five or six years. ... Engineering physics (EP) is an academic degree, usually at the level of Bachelor of Science. ... The University of Toronto (U of T) is a coeducational public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ... Electrical Engineers design power systems… … and complex electronic circuits. ... Princeton University is a coeducational private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States of America. ...

He has on occasion revealed it was his own pun which led to the use of the name 'Unix' (initially 'Unics') for the operating system Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were working on.

Summary of Achievements

• Hello, world, a program originally written in B to demonstrate B's extrn variables (equivalent to C's extern)
• The AWK programming language, along with Al Aho and Peter Weinberger and its book The AWK Programming Language
• The AMPL programming language
• The book The Practice of Programming
• Software Tools, a book and set of tools for C Pascal, BASIC, and FORTRAN, cocreated in part with P.J. Plauger
• The Unix Programming Environment, a tutorial book along with Rob Pike
• The C Programming Language along with C creator Dennis Ritchie, the first ever book on C
• The pic typesetting language for troff
• The eqn typesetting language for troff, along with Lorinda Cherry
• The Practice of Programming, also with Rob Pike
• Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language, a popular criticism of the Pascal programming language by Niklaus Wirth. Some parts of the criticism are obsolete due to ISO 7185 (Programming Languages - Pascal), the criticism was written before ISO 7185 was even created. See below for a link. (AT&T Computing Science Technical Report #100)
• ditroff
• The m4 macro processing language, with Dennis Ritchie

A hello world program is a computer program that prints out Hello, world! on a display device. ... B was the name of a programming language developed at Bell Labs. ... C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... AWK is a general purpose computer language that is designed for processing text-based data, either in files or data streams. ... Dr. Alfred V. Aho is a computer scientist. ... The AMPL programming language is a high-level programming language for describing and solving high complexity problems for large scale mathematical computation. ... The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, is a 1999 book about computer programming and software engineering, published by Addison-Wesley. ... C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... Screenshot of Atari BASIC, an early BASIC language for small computers. ... Fortran (previously FORTRAN[1]) is a general-purpose[2], procedural,[3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... P. J. Plauger is a well-known author and entrepreneur. ... Written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of Bell Labs, it is the first ever book on the Unix operating system. ... Rob Pike (born 1956) is a software engineer and author. ... The C Programming Language, second edition, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, widely regarded to be the authoritative reference on C. The C Programming Language (sometimes referred to as K&R) is a well-known computer science book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally... Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. ... Pic is a domain-specific language by Brian Kernighan for specifying diagrams in terms of objects such as boxes with arrows between them. ... Troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system. ... Part of the troff suite of Unix document layout tools, eqn is a preprocessor that formats equations for printing. ... Troff is a document processing system developed by AT&T for the Unix operating system. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... Niklaus E. Wirth (born February 15, 1934) is a Swiss computer scientist, best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering. ... Ditroff is the device independent version of the troff text formatter. ... m4 is a macro processing language designed by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. ... Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. ...

Writings

• Software Tools (1976 with P. J. Plauger)
• Software Tools in Pascal (1981 with P. J. Plauger)
• The C Programming Language ("K&R") (1978, 1988 with Dennis Ritchie)
• The Elements of Programming Style (1974, 1978 with P. J. Plauger)
• The Unix Programming Environment (1984 with Rob Pike)
• The AWK Programming Language (1988 with Al Aho and Peter J. Weinberger)
• The Practice of Programming (1999 with Rob Pike)
• AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming, 2nd Ed. (2003 with Robert Fourer and David Gay)

1976 (MCMLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ... P. J. Plauger is a well-known author and entrepreneur. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... P. J. Plauger is a well-known author and entrepreneur. ... The C Programming Language, second edition, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, widely regarded to be the authoritative reference on C. The C Programming Language (sometimes referred to as K&R) is a well-known computer science book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally... Dennis Ritchie Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix. ... cover for the second edition The Elements of Programming Style, by Brian W. Kernighan the creator of C, is a book about good styles in which programers write their code. ... P. J. Plauger is a well-known author and entrepreneur. ... Written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of Bell Labs, it is the first ever book on the Unix operating system. ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Rob Pike (born 1956) is a software engineer and author. ... 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Dr. Alfred V. Aho is a computer scientist. ... Peter J. Weinberger is a computer scientist who worked at AT&T Bell Labs and contributed to the design of the pioneering AWK programming language (he is the W in AWK). ... The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, is a 1999 book about computer programming and software engineering, published by Addison-Wesley. ... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... Rob Pike (born 1956) is a software engineer and author. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Brian Kernighan

• Brian Kernighan's home page at Princeton U.
• Brian Kernighan's home page at Bell Labs
• "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language" – By Brian Kernighan, AT&T Bell Labs, 2 April 1981
• An Interview with Brian Kernighan – By Mihai Budiu, for PC Report Romania, August 2000
• Interview with Brian Kernighan – By Aleksey Dolya, for Linux Journal, July 2003.
• Transcript of an interview with Brian Kernighan – Interview by Michael S. Mahoney
• Video - TechNetCast At Bell Labs: Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan (1999-05-14)
• Video (Princeton University, September 7, 2003) - "Assembly for the Class of 2007: 'D is for Digital and Why It Matters'"
• A Descent into Limbo by Brian Kernighan
• Photos of Brian Kernighan
• Brian Kernighan at the Notable Names Database