Brian Wilson Kernighan (/ˈkɜːrnɪhæn/;[5][6] born January 30, 1942)[2] is a Canadian computer scientist.

[7] He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1969, completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Some graph partitioning problems related to program segmentation" under the supervision of Peter G.

[17] Kernighan is also known for coining the expression "What You See Is All You Get" (WYSIAYG), which is a sarcastic variant of the original "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG).

In 1972, Kernighan described memory management in strings using "hello" and "world", in the B programming language,[19] which became the iconic example we know today.

[21] Kernighan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for contributions to software and to programming languages.

[22][23] In 2022, Kernighan stated that he was actively working on improvements to the AWK programming language, which he took part in creating in 1977.