Dennis Ritchie co-inventor of UNIX and creator of the C programming language
Dennis Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941 in Bronxville, New York. Dr. Ritchie got his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1968. After graduation, he joined Bell-Labs, following his father's footsteps.
Early in his career at Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie worked on the MULTICS operating system, as well as the BCPL programming language.
After that came the many years of successful collaboration with Ken Thompson, which came to fruition with the creation of UNIX. During the development of UNIX, Ritchie modified Thompson's B programming language, and thus created the programming language we all love: C. Along with Brian Kernighan, Ritchie is also the author of the most famous book on C, The C Programming Language.
Along with Ken Thompson, Ritchie received the prestigious Turing award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system."
Today, Dennis Ritchie manaages the research group at Bell Labs that developed the Plan9 operating system.
Most of this information can be gathered from Dennis Ritchie's home page at: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/