Brian Kernighan

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Brian Wilson Kernighan, (IPA pronunciation: ['kɛrnɪˌhæn], the 'g' is silent); born 1942, is a computer scientist who worked at the Bell Labs and contributed to the design of the pioneering AWK and AMPL programming languages. He is also the author of the famous Hello, world program.

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.

In collaboration with Shen Lin he devised well-known approximation algorithms 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.)

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 the name AWK mean "Kernighan."

He was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and received his Bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University, where since 2000 he has held a professorship in the department of computer science.

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