Dennis Ritchie 1941-2011

Another great man from informatics has passed away. This week Dennis Ritchie left us. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie  commonly known by his username dmr, was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era". He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague, Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system, software that powers everything from smartphones to search engines.
Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. 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 Ph.D. from Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer.
Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).
The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. UNIX has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of computing.
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. Check this video "Unix history" by K&R

To finish the post I'll let you some interesting quotes from him.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
"C has the power of assembly language and the convenience of... assembly language."

RIP Dennis Ritchie