Apart from the usuals like K&R, John McCarthy, Simon Peyton-Jones, Joe Armstrong, Bjarne Stroustroup, and so on, I'd like to mention one more, sort of different from the rest.

Ton Roosendaal.

He started Blender and oversaw its crowdfunded release as an open source project (look it up, it's pretty cool), provides excellent leadership at the Blender Foundation, is a crack programmer, very nice dude and down to earth. His leadership, vision, and handling of Blender's growth as FOSS software and artist-focused DCC tool is amazing. He might not be the brains behind Blender's technical advances all that much (now) but he's a great example of what one can do for software beyond just programming.

Why don't people use Ctype.h in C for verifying whether the input is alphanumeric or not? Why bother with the long ass if, when you can just have the result with a simple function?