Brian W. Kernighan

Brian Wilson Kernighan
Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs (Photograph by Ben Lowe)
Born	(1942-01-01) January 1, 1942 (age 75) Toronto, Ontario
Citizenship	Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Princeton University
Alma mater	University of Toronto Princeton University
Known for	Unix, AWK, AMPL The C Programming Language (book)

Brian Wilson Kernighan (/ˈkɜːrnᵻhæn/; born January 1, 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and the "K" in AWK both stand for "Kernighan". Since 2000 Brian Kernighan has been a Professor at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University, where he is also the Undergraduate Department Representative.

Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on 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"). 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.)