When I was a young high school kid, interested in AI, I emailed Marvin Minsky at MIT and he responded. I was very impressed that I got a response but unfortunately young enough not to save the email. I really wish I still had that!
Also one of the few people who can be known simply by his initials. The only other two I can think of off the top of my head are ESR and GvR (Eric S. Raymond and Guido van Rossen, for those not in the know).
I feel like ESR, RMS and GvR would be recognised in just about every hacker-hangout. PG, outside of HN (and maybe some other places), not so much.
(Of course, it's self-reinforcing. People know ESR by his initials because that's how other people refer to him, and you can refer to him by his initials because people will know who you're talking about.)
I've gotten to meet most of the leaders in the casual / web games industry. I don't know how important any of them are in the grand scheme of things but there's some majorly cool guys who's accomplishments include working on games and sites many millions have loved - Jim Greer (Kongregate), Joel Breton (Addicting Games), Daniel McNeely (Armor Games), Sean Cooper (made Syndicate all those years ago!) for instance.
I guess "important" is all relative ... but I emailed John Carmack once and he wrote me back. When I look back at how simplistic my question was considering everything I now know it makes me appreciate his response even more.
Barbara Liskov of MIT who won the 2008 Turing award. The Turing award is computer science's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Liskov's email style is direct, precise, and (yes) efficient. Just like her science.
I got a response from Peter Norvig a few months back. I've also gotten responses from the some Danish members of parlaiment which you've probably never heard of.
I've also written Greg Graffin. I actually wrote him in 2000 to tell them that their website was terrible and that I could do a better job on it. It turns out GG was maintaining it himself at the time and said he would talk to some people about letting me. It never went anywhere unfortunately but it is my best story.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] thread(If Usenet counts, Bjarne Stroustrup)
(Of course, it's self-reinforcing. People know ESR by his initials because that's how other people refer to him, and you can refer to him by his initials because people will know who you're talking about.)
John Graham Cumming (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jgrahamc) beats me by many lengths though: http://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.html