Brian Kernighan

Brian Kernighan
Brian Kernighan in 2012
Born
Brian Wilson Kernighan

(1942-01-30) January 30, 1942 (age 82)[2][3]
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
NationalityCanadian
CitizenshipCanada
Alma materUniversity of Toronto (BASc)
Princeton University (PhD)
Known for
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsPrinceton University
ThesisSome Graph Partitioning Problems Related to Program Segmentation (1969)
Doctoral advisorPeter Weiner[1]
Websitewww.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/

Brian Wilson Kernighan (/ˈkɜːrnɪhæn/;[5][6] born January 30, 1942)[2] 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]

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.

  1. ^ Kernighan, Brian Wilson (1969). Some Graph Partitioning Problems Related to Program Segmentation (PhD thesis). Princeton University. OCLC 39166855. ProQuest 302450661. (subscription required)
  2. ^ a b The Library of Congress. "Kernighan, Brian W. - LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress)". id.loc.gov. Retrieved 3 March 2023.
  3. ^ Lohr, Steve (31 October 2002). "To the Liberal Arts, He Adds Computer Science". The New York Times. Mr. Kernighan, 60, is a computer scientist
  4. ^ "C" Programming Language: Brian Kernighan - Computerphile on YouTube
  5. ^ Pike, Rob. "The History of Unix". YouTube. Archived from the original on 2021-11-23. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  6. ^ Nerd Talk - Doug McIlroy & Brian Kernighan, retrieved 2023-12-16
  7. ^ Dolya, Aleksey (29 July 2003). "Interview with Brian Kernighan". Linux Journal.
  8. ^ Brian Kernighan author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  9. ^ "An Oral History of Unix". 2007-06-11. Archived from the original on 2007-06-11. Retrieved 2020-05-13.
  10. ^ "Brian Kernighan | Computer Science Department at Princeton University". www.cs.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2020-05-13.