Brian Kernighan

By his own account, in 1964 he went through the Canadian engineers’ “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer,” at which his father had received the same ring in 1931.⁠[1]

In 1969, he received a PhD from Princeton University with a dissertation on graph partitioning problems related to program segmentation.⁠[2]

In 1970, he and Shen Lin published a graph-partitioning heuristic in the Bell System Technical Journal, patented in 1971; in 1973 they published a traveling-salesman heuristic.⁠[2]

The Elements of Programming Style, which he co-wrote, appeared in 1974, and Software Tools in 1976.⁠[2]

In 1978, The C Programming Language, which he co-wrote with Dennis Ritchie, was first published; universally known as “K&R” after its authors, it remains a standard reference.⁠[3]

In 1984, Prentice-Hall published The Unix Programming Environment, which he co-wrote with Rob Pike.⁠[4]

In 1988, Prentice Hall published the second edition of The C Programming Language; the book has been translated into many languages including Albanian, Danish, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish, with several Chinese editions.⁠[5]

In 1994, he, Eric Grosse and Lorinda Cherry did the technical work for an online version of AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry’s 800 directory, about 157,000 records searchable through the Mosaic browser; it went public on October 19, 1994, running on a Plan 9 machine.⁠[6]

In 1999, Addison-Wesley published The Practice of Programming, which he co-wrote with Rob Pike.⁠[7]

By his own account, he joined Bell Labs right after graduate school and stayed about 30 years; by fall 2001 he had been on the Princeton faculty for one year.⁠[1]

He published Millions, Billions, Zillions (2018), Unix: A History and a Memoir (2019) and the second edition of Understanding the Digital World (2021).⁠[8]

On July 18, 2020, he appeared on episode #109 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, introduced as co-author with Dennis Ritchie of the classic C book, co-creator of the text-processing language AWK and co-designer of the optimization modeling language AMPL; the episode covered the early days and philosophy of UNIX, AWK, C and Go, AMPL and graph theory, AI in 1964, and Moore’s law.⁠[9]

In September 2022, he, David F. Brailsford and William A. Ritchie presented a paper at the 22nd ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2022) asking how Dennis Ritchie’s 1968 Harvard PhD thesis was typeset, noting that Ritchie never officially received the degree and the thesis disappeared for nearly 50 years.⁠[10]

In fall 2022, he taught COS 109, “Computers in Our World,” at Princeton as a professor, a course for students who will not build computing systems but are strongly affected by them.⁠[11]

In spring 2023, he and Meredith Martin of the English department co-taught the seminar HUM 307, “Literature as Data,” introducing basic concepts of working with literary texts and data.⁠[12]

As of October 2026, his homepage lists research on post-OCR correction with GPT models and the history of document preparation; recent books include the second edition of The AWK Programming Language with Al Aho and Peter Weinberger.⁠[8]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]