Alex Stepanov retired last week. He’s one of the most prominent members of the C++ community and one of the most innovative contributors to the C++ standard. He was the father of the STL and probably the first promotor of “concepts” as we now know them. Concepts, as specified in the ISO TS, will ship as part of GCC6.0 “any day now.” His work on generic programming goes back in time through Ada (1987), Scheme (1986), and Tecton (1981). See his list of contributions (books, articles, talks, and videos): http://www.stepanovpapers.com/. Without him, we would not have had generic programming as we know it and C++ would have been a very different and poorer language.

For the mathematically oriented among us, I strongly recommend his recent books: Mathematics to Generic Programming with Daniel E. Rose and Elements of Programming with Paul McJones. He got a great sendoff from his most recent employer, A9; they even issued a special stamp in his honor: