I don't know about order... they've all done some amazing stuff. FWIW, there's some interesting historical / biographical information on some of these folks in two books, both by Steven Levy:
Artificial Life
and
Hackers: Heroes Of The Computer Revolution
That said, the stuff Claude Shannon did basically established the field of Information Theory[1], which underpins huge swathes of our modern digital world. You could do worse than reading up on him.
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This is such a great list, I just started frantically jotting some of these names down so I can start digging into their work.
Is there any particular order I should tackle these?
I don't know about order... they've all done some amazing stuff. FWIW, there's some interesting historical / biographical information on some of these folks in two books, both by Steven Levy:
Artificial Life
and
Hackers: Heroes Of The Computer Revolution
That said, the stuff Claude Shannon did basically established the field of Information Theory[1], which underpins huge swathes of our modern digital world. You could do worse than reading up on him.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory