Peter Jay Weinberger (born August 6, 1942) is a computer scientist best known for his early work at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

. He now works at

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

. Weinberger was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, graduating in 1964. He received his PhD in mathematics (

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Mat ...

) in 1969 from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

under

Derrick Henry Lehmer Derrick Henry "Dick" Lehmer (February 23, 1905 – May 22, 1991), almost always cited as D.H. Lehmer, was an American mathematician significant to the development of computational number theory. Lehmer refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and ...

for a thesis entitled "Proof of a Conjecture of Gauss on Class Number Two". After holding a position in the Department of Mathematics at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

, Ann Arbor, where he continued his work in analytic number theory, he moved to

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

. At Bell Labs, Weinberger contributed to the design of the

AWK programming language AWK (''awk'') is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems. The AWK lang ...

(he is the "W" in AWK), and the Fortran compiler f77. A detailed explanation of his contributions to AWK and other Unix tools is found in a
interview transcript
at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

. Another interview sheds some light on his work at Google. Both interviews also confirm rumors about his involvement in early digital photography, especially the abuse of a photograph of his face for demonstrating digital imaging effects. When Peter Weinberger was promoted to head of Computer Science Research at Bell Labs, his picture was merged with the AT&T "death star" logo of the mid-80s, creating th
PJW Face
image that has appeared in innumerable locations, including T-shirts, coffee mugs, CDs, and at least one water tower. Th
sole remaining PJW Face
at Bell Labs is somewhat in disarray, but there are plans afoot to repair it. Prior to joining Google, Weinberger was chief technology officer at

Renaissance Technologies Renaissance Technologies LLC, also known as RenTech or RenTec, is an American hedge fund based in East Setauket, New York, on Long Island, which specializes in systematic trading using quantitative models derived from mathematical and statisti ...

. Weinberger has been a member of the

JASON defense advisory group JASON is an independent group of elite scientists which advises the United States government on matters of science and technology, mostly of a sensitive nature. The group was created in the aftermath of the Sputnik launch as a way to reinvigorate ...

since 1990. He has an Erdos Number of 2.

Writings

* ''The book's webpage includes downloads of the current implementation of Awk and links to others.''

References

External links

*
Web site dedicated to PJW's face
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Weinberger, Peter J. Living people American computer scientists Scientists at Bell Labs Google employees Programming language designers Swarthmore College alumni 1942 births American chief technology officers University of Michigan faculty Members of JASON (advisory group) 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews