Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






Edit]IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

Ken Thompson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other people named Ken Thompson, see Ken Thompson (disambiguation).

Kenneth Lane Thompson
Thompson (left) with Dennis Ritchie.
Born February 4, 1943 (age 69) New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.
Nationality United States of America
Fields Computer Science
Institutions Bell Labs Entrisphere, Inc Google Inc.
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
Known for Unix B (programming language) Belle (chess machine) UTF-8 Endgame tablebase
Notable awards Turing Award National Medal of Technology Tsutomu Kanai Award

Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles,[1] is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson is notable for his work with the B programming language (basing it mainly on the BCPL language he had used to write Unix while in the MULTICS project), the C programming language, the Go programming language, and as one of the creators and early developers of the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems.

Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle, and most recently the co-creation of Google's programming language Go.

Contents [hide] · 1 Biography · 2 Notes · 3 Awards o 3.1 Turing Award o 3.2 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal o 3.3 Fellow of the Computer History Museum o 3.4 National Medal of Technology o 3.5 Tsutomu Kanai Award o 3.6 Japan Prize · 4 References · 5 External links

Edit]Biography

Thompson was born in New Orleans. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp.[2]

In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language. The two left the Multics project when Bell Labs withdrew from it, but they used the experience from the project, and in 1969, Thompson and Ritchie became the principal creators of the Unix operating system. At this time, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and created B, a precursor to Ritchie's C.[3]

Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED, which included regular expressions for searching text. QED and Thompson's later editor ed (the default editor on Unix) contributed greatly to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, previously regarded mostly as a tool (or toy) for logicians.[citation needed] Regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs (such as grep) and in modern programming languages such as Perl; they are also a central concept in Rob Pike's sam text editor. Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson's notation for them.



Thompson also developed UTF-8 (a widely used character encoding scheme) together with Rob Pike in 1992.[4]

Along with Joseph Condon, he created the hardware and software for Belle, a world champion chess computer. He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, known as endgame tablebases, for all 4, 5, and 6-piece endings, allowing chess-playing computer programs to make "perfect" moves once a position stored in them is reached. Later, with the help of chess endgame expert John Roycroft, Thompson distributed his first results on CD-ROM.

Thompson's style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements.[citation needed]

In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs. He worked at Entrisphere, Inc as a fellow until 2006 and now works at Google as a Distinguished Engineer.

Thompson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1980 for "designing UNIX, an operating systems whose efficiency, breadth, power, and style have guided a generation's exploitation of minicomputers."[5]

Edit]Notes

When Seibel (Coders at Work's interview) asked him: "How did you learn to program?" He said that: "I was always fascinated with logic and even in grade school I’d work on arithmetic problems in binary, stuff like that. Just because I was fascinated." [6]

Edit]Awards

Thompson (left) and Ritchie (center) receiving the National Medal of Technology from PresidentClinton.

Edit]Turing Award

In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system. His acceptance speech, "Reflections on Trusting Trust"[7] presented the backdoor attack now known as the Thompson hack or trusting trust attack, and is widely considered a seminal computer security work in its own right.

edit]IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

In 1990, both Thompson and Dennis Ritchie received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE), "for the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language".[8]


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 684


<== previous page | next page ==>
I. ZAHAJOVACÍ SLOVO | Small NL review--girls
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.007 sec.)