A few people who were influential to me:
Richard Branson
Dean Kamen
Richard Feynman
PG (our obvious common denominator)
Mr. Edwards: 6th grade science teacher, leader of the Sour Lake Elementary Model Rocket Club.
Uncle Todd: Showed me my first computer (Apple II), fed me with electronics, bought me my first decent soldering iron.
Professer Hahn: Had the patience to walk me through physics that was way over my head, because he believed I could do it and was so excited about it. We eventually co-published a paper.
Steve Koster: Web early-bird, ex-boss. Taught me stuff about design. Gave me the freedom to hack on cool stuff and get paid for it.
All of those people have done infinitely more to inspire me than anyone on your list. The difference? They're people that believed in me and acted on that.
Could I propose a new rule? No more fawning over Paul on this site. It's just kind of yucky.
1. My daughter. She's not yet 5. She's inspirational because watching a small child come to grips with the world and discover it makes you look again at things you take for granted and see them as new again.
For example, I showed her the pendulum of a clock and how it swings back and forth based on its length (not the size of the weight or the angle it starts at). The length of a pendulum counting seconds is where we get the length one metre from. So time and space come together in such a simple thing. Also you can use a pendulum to show the rotation of the earth.
So many simple and beautiful things to discover. Also, the original measurement of the metre was done by Mersenne of primes fame. BTW, did you ever notice how children count things by pointing at them one by one and saying the number? That sort of counting let's you can go straight to Cantor's pairing function that the number of rationals is the same as the number of naturals. It's child's play.
(OK, better stop of I'm going to turn into James Burke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series))
2. My A level Advanced Maths teacher who told me that there was "a Group, Ring or Field lurking in every corner". He showed me the beauty of logic and studying systems specified by a few axioms.
3. When I was about 6 years old my parents took me to Cambridge for a couple of days organized by the National Association for Gifted Children (http://www.nagcbritain.org.uk/) where I remember clearly a man (no doubt a Cambridge don) explaining to me the theoretical operation of a computer. It was only years later that I realized that he had explained the operation of a Turing Machine. I was utterly fascinated.
Also: it's been a year since this has been submitted. I think dupes should be allowed once a year. Does everyone think this is ok to submit?
Friggi (ex coworker)
Nietzsche
G. J. Sussman
Will Wright
Danielle Bunten
Tim Peters
PG
Norvig
Just to add a little to the ideas vs execution debate: stories of people whose ideas were not recognized in their time (e.g. Hermann Grassmann) generally interest me more, especially when the reasons for their failures provide lessons from which to learn.
And many, many others.
Gandhi, Einstein, Alinsky.