Famous (or semi-famous or infamous) people in the world of programming, and their purported reasons for being famous. Most information shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia, with some additions from E2's base when available. Additions welcome, just /msg me.

Beginnings
• John von Neumann - maths, von Neumann architecture, MANIAC I
• Alan Turing - Turing machine, cryptanalysis, COLOSSUS, Manchester Mark 1

• Donald Knuth - The Art of Computer Programming, TeX, literate programming
• Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month
• Bjarne Stroustrup - C++
• Andrew Tanenbaum - MINIX
• John Carmack - Doom, Quake, id Software
• Bertrand Meyer - Eiffel
• Jeff Duntemann
• Paul Graham - Lisp, Arc, venture capitalism
• Tim Berners-Lee - WWW, semantic web
• Ward Cunningham - developed the first wiki web
• Joel Spolski - "Joel on Software" blog

Open Source, Linux, GNU, FSF, etc
• Linus Torvalds - Linux
• Richard M. Stallman (Richard Stallman, RMS) - GNU, FSF, emacs
• Larry Wall - Perl
• Eric S. Raymond - The Jargon File, fetchmail, Halloween Documents
• Alan Cox - Linux kernel and drivers
• Jamie Zawinski, jwz - Mozilla
• Haskell B. Curry - haskell
• Guido van Rossum - Python
• The Debian Project
  • Ian Murdock - founder, latter half of name.
  • Bruce Perens
  • Ian Jackson
  • Wichert Akkerman

The Cryptography experts
• Bruce Schneier - security, cryptosystems, blowfish
• Phil Zimmerman - PGP