Pioneers of Computer Science

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

Dennis Ritchie- Born September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011

Ken Thompson - Born February 4, 1943 – present

By: Chase Dicharry

Personal life/Education Dennis Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York

in 1941. He graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics and with a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1968.

Ken Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1943. He received a bachelors and masters degree. in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.

Both of them worked at Bell Labs.Thompson now works at google where he is still

contributing to computer science.

Earlier works Thompson invented the B programming

language and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems.

Thompson also worked on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed and created endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.

Contribution to Computer ScienceRitchie and Thompson designed and

implemented the original Unix operating system.

Ritchie is also known for creating the C programming language.

Thompson also co-invented the Go programming language.

Their main contribution to computer science is the Unix operating system and that is what they are most known for today.

Awards Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing

Award in 1983.They both received IEEE Richard W.

Hamming Medal in 1990.In 1999 they received the National Medal of

Technology of 1998 from President Bill Clinton.

In 2011 Ritchie and Thompson received the Japan Prize for Information and Communications.