Brian Kernighan

Brian Wilson Kernighan [ kɛrnɪhæn ] ( born 1942 in Toronto, Ontario ) is a Canadian computer scientist who became known as the co-author of The C Programming Language. He is considered the co-developers of C, however, the programming language writes itself exclusively to Dennis Ritchie.

Biography

Kernighan made ​​at the University of Toronto bachelor's degree in Technical Physics. At Princeton University, where he earned a doctorate in electrical engineering, he is now employed as a professor in the computer science department.

He worked at Bell Labs and helped the awk and AMPL programming language to develop. In addition, he wrote many Unix programs, among them " ditroff ". Both in "K & R C" as well as " awk " is the K for Kernighan.

In 1970 he developed together with Shen Lin heuristic Kernighan -Lin algorithm for graph partitioning and 1973 also with Shen Lin Lin - Kernighan heuristic which for the problem of a Salesman. In 1999, the highly acclaimed book The Practice of Programming appeared ( German: programming practice ), which he co-authored with Rob Pike. The two authors there the principles of " Simplicity, clarity and generality " as fundamental to the programming, where The individual chapters include such topics as algorithms, implementation, testing, debugging, performance, and portability.

Rob Pike and Brian W. Kernighan published in 1984 the book The Unix Programming Environment ( German title The Unix toolbox. Programming with Unix), which introduces the programming principles of Unix.

Kernighan the INFORMS Impact Prize for 2012 was awarded.