don knuth.<p>Besides from his talent, I love the fact that he is still working on a project that will never be finished -TAOCP.<p>I look up to him as a hacker, not an academic, in the way that hackers scratch an itch and write something cool. His itch was typesetting, so he just nonchalantly created tex. Using a methodology (literate programming) he created to scratch a previous itch.<p>Plus he likes to compose music (great hackers hack across domains)