June 9, 2006
At its Class Day ceremony, the engineering school conferred its Distinguished Teacher Award to Kernighan, who is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton Engineering in 1969, Kernighan joined Bell Labs, where he was one of the founding fathers of the Unix world, contributing a wealth of software development and text formatting tools. He also wrote several highly used textbooks in computer science, including the classic “C Programming Language,” which has been translated into more than two dozen languages. At Princeton he has taught courses for beginners as well as advanced students.
In nominating Kernighan, a former student said, “…one of his greatest strengths is his ability to introduce and discuss the conceptual underpinnings of a topic, and then help students understand it in the context of something he had worked on during his career.”
The full story of the event can be found here.