Co-author of the first book on the C programming language and programmer of well-known Unix utilities such as ditroff and cron, Kernighan worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed greatly to Unix and its school of thought. He has also been coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and the "K" in AWK both stand for "Kernighan".
Kernighan has served as a Professor at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University, where he has also been the Undergraduate Department Representative. 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.
