Brian Kernighan
Brian Kernighan
Brian Wilson Kernighan 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...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth1 January 1942
CountryCanada
Bell Labs was an astonishing place for many decades, though it fell on somewhat hard times during the telecom meltdown some years ago, as its corporate owner had to cope with shrinking markets.
Anytime you want to hear about graph partitioning, I will be glad to tell you what I know about graph partitioning. It remains a standard problem. I think it's an interesting problem, because it shows up in a variety of guises in real life.
It's important to be informed about issues like usability, reliability, security, privacy, and some of the inherent limitations of computers.
I really enjoyed Princeton as a graduate student.
I had spent the summer of 1966 working at MIT in the group that was the MIT component of the Multics effort.
For better or worse, the people who become leaders and decision makers in politics, law and business are going to come from schools like Princeton.
Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.
Computers and computing are all around us. Some computing is highly visible, like your laptop. But this is only part of a computing iceberg. A lot more lies hidden below the surface. We don't see and usually don't think about the computers inside appliances, cars, airplanes, cameras, smartphones, GPS navigators and games.
Technology is mostly a force for good, but it has its downsides, too. I want my students - and my readers - to be intelligently skeptical about technology and be informed about the good and the not-so-good parts.