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 known as the Lin–Kernighan heuristic.
Kernighan has been a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University since 2000 and is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science.[8][9][10] In 2015, he co-authored the book The Go Programming Language.
Kernighan was born in Toronto. He attended the University of Toronto between 1960 and 1964, earning his Bachelor's degree in engineering physics.[7] He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Some graph partitioning problems related to program segmentation" under the supervision of Peter G. Weiner.[11][12]
Career and research
Kernighan has held a professorship in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton since 2000. Each fall he teaches a course called "Computers in Our World", which introduces the fundamentals of computing to non-majors.
Kernighan was the 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.[13]
Kernighan coined the term Unix and helped popularize Thompson's Unix philosophy.[14] Kernighan is also known as a coiner of the expression "What You See Is All You Get" (WYSIAYG), which is a sarcastic variant of the original "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG).[15] Kernighan's term is used to indicate that WYSIWYG systems might throw away information in a document that could be useful in other contexts.
Kernighan's original 1978 implementation of Hello, World! was sold at The Algorithm Auction, the world's first auction of computer algorithms.[16]
In 1996, Kernighan taught CS50 which is the Harvard University introductory course in Computer Science.[5]
Kernighan was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.[17][18]
The Unix Programming Environment, a tutorial book, with Rob Pike
"Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", a popular criticism of Niklaus Wirth's Pascal. Some parts of the criticism are obsolete due to ISO 7185 (Programming Languages - Pascal); the criticism was written before ISO 7185 was created. (AT&T Computing Science Technical Report #100)
Publications
The Elements of Programming Style (1974, 1978) with P. J. Plauger
^Kernighan, Brian Wilson (1969). Some Graph Partitioning Problems Related to Program Segmentation (PhD thesis). Princeton University. OCLC 39166855. ProQuest 302450661. (subscription required)
^Mendez, Cordelia F. (2014). "This is CS50". thecrimson.com. The Harvard Crimson. Archived from the original on 2017-03-17.
^ abMalan, David J. (2010). "Reinventing CS50". Proceeding of SIGCSE '10 Proceedings of the 41st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education: 152. doi:. ISBN 9781450300063.
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