Dennis Ritchie who developed C one of the most widely used computing languages of all time.

It's the birthday of Dennis Ritchie, who was born in 1941 in Bronxville, New York. After graduating with a degree in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard University, Ritchie joined the staff at Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center. From 1969 to 1973 he developed C, one of the most widely used computing languages of all time. While he worked on C, Ritchie and his Bell Labs colleague Ken Thompson (left) developed the Unix operating system, which made its public debut in 1973 and is still being used. In a lecture he gave in 1983, Ritchie sought to characterize his field: "Computer science research is different from these more traditional disciplines. Philosophically it differs from the physical sciences because it seeks not to discover, explain, or exploit the natural world, but instead to study the properties of machines of human creation. In this it as analogous to mathematics, and indeed the 'science' part of computer science is, for the most part mathematical in spirit. But an inevitable aspect of computer science is the creation of computer programs: objects that, though intangible, are subject to commercial exchange." Ritchie died in 2011.