"Dennis Ritchie" Inventor of C Programming Language and CoCreator of Unix

Dennis Ritchie(1941-2011)

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist, He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system.Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983,the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the 'R' in K&R C and commonly known by his username dmr.

Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he received a PhD from Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer, his doctoral dissertation being "Program Structure and Computational Complexity".

Ritchie was found dead on October 12, 2011, at the age of 70 at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.His death came a week after Steve Jobs', but did not receive as much media coverage.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

refrence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie