Brian Kernighan (original) (raw)

Brian Kernighan is a computer scientist, who worked at the Bell Labs. He contributed to the design of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. His 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 C: "It's entirely Dennis Ritchie's work". He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff.

Brian's last name's initial is the "K" of K&R C and also the "K" in the name AWK.

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

His papers include:

'Kernighan' is pronounced Ker'-ni-han; the 'g' is silent.