Brian Wilson Kernighan (placeholder)

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/bwk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan

Brian Wilson Kernighan (pronounced /ˈkɛrnɪhæn/, 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.

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 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.)

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’.