Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson | |
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Thompson, 2019 | |
| Born | Kenneth Lane Thompson February 4, 1943 New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Education | University of California, Berkeley (BS, MS) |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
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| Website | http://cs.bell-labs.co/who/ken/ |
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go language. A recipient of the Turing award,[3] he is considered one of the greatest computer programmers of all time.[4][5][6]
Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle. He won the Turing Award in 1983 with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie.
- ^ "IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on Nov 24, 2010. Retrieved Mar 20, 2021.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
nasmemberwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "A.M. Turing Award Winners by Year". amturing.acm.org. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025.
- ^ Naskar, Vivek (Jun 9, 2021). "11 Most Influential & Greatest Programmers Of All Time - The Developer Story". thedeveloperstory.com. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025.
- ^ Hossain, Md Zakir (Feb 1, 2023). "Top 10 Greatest Programmers in the World of all Time". Medium. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025.
- ^ "Top Programmers in the World of All Time". GeeksforGeeks. Sep 26, 2019. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025.