Brian Kernighan (1942- ) is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and is presently a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Among many other achievements, he is credited with co-creating the Unix operating system along with Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and co-creating the AWK and AMPL programming languages (the 'K' in "AWK" stands for "Kernighan").
Kernighan is also known for co-authoring, along with Dennis Ritchie, the first book on the C programming language, The C Programming Language (usually known simply as "K&R", after the authors). However, Kernighan maintains that he had no part in the design of the C language ("It was entirely Dennis Ritchie's work"). A graduate in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto Kernighan, like most of the other Bell Labs wizards, is known to sport a bushy beard.