David Huffman (1925-1999), creator of the Huffman coding compression scheme, folder of abstract mathematical paper art. Theory guy, whom I look up to and respect. Most people use the results of his work every day without thinking about it; JPEG, MP3, and gzip all use Huffman coding in some form, for example. As of October 8, 1999, the latest in a rash of important oldskool CS pioneers dying. :(