Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941October 12, 2011), 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.  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.