Brian W. Kernighan

Kernighan is a leading scholar and educator in programming languages and digital humanities. His twelve books and many papers have had a profound impact on the field of software. In particular, his book, The C Programming Language (1978 with Dennis Ritchie), taught millions of people worldwide how to write elegant, efficient C programs. It played a major role in making C the world's dominant systems programming language. His little languages, ampl, awk, eqn, pic, and ratfor, are widely used for optimization, text processing, typesetting, and scientific computing. The Lin-Kernighan algorithm is the best-known heuristic for solving the traveling salesman problem.