Last year's position : Not Placed

Say that Ka-NOOTH. Not an obvious choice, but in the words of one the panellists this year "a representative of the people who did really sterling work, did the hard work to make things happen". Knuth is more than an academic: now retired, he studied and published seminal work on some of the fundamental computer algorithms. Maybe not all his books were perfect, or even completed, but they remain influential today, still used as textbooks in universities the world over and by professional developers beyond that.