It's hard to be involved with programming for a long period of time and not run into Shannon, he is one of the foundational people in who worked on the theories

It's hard to be involved with programming for a long period of time and not run into Shannon, he is one of the foundational people in who worked on the theories underpinning modern computers and telecommunications. Another is Dijkstra, In fact it's not overstating the case to say that Dijkstra's algorithmn (and it's descendants) and the Shannon limit are two fundamentals to the way the internet works.