[loquor]

The eminent researchers in Distributed Systems are so interesting. I find Edsger Dijkstra and Leslie Lamport to be very colorful and inspiring characters.

Edsger Dijkstra was a pioneer in computing. Yet he lived like a luddite. He did not own a television or go to the movies and did not even own a personal computer until much later in his career! He enjoyed playing the piano and left behind a large amount of papers and documentation - both personal and technical.

Leslie Lamport wrote one seminal paper after another in the field of distributed computing and concurrency. He co-created LaTex and the Paxos algorithm. He then rigorously defined the temporal logic of actions (TLA) which is a mathematically correct basis for a checking a program's behaviour/models at a high level. I took his TLA+ web course recently. The presentation of the course is fantastic. His mirthful yet sincere attitude really shines through in it.

Are there any pioneering researchers who you find fascinating?

[tomrod]

Thanks for pointing out TLA!

Hawking was great, and wrote a fantastic book called "God Invented the Integers" where he details fascinating seminal math contributions.

I'm a geek for Horn and Johnson of Matrix Analysis fame.

Munkres topology has been bedtime reading for a long time.

Quite a few philosophers strike my fancy, especially the existential school.