Recognize the name? He was the guy that NBC’s jackass announcers hadn’t heard of and told you to Google to find out, another step in their atrocious and disgraceful handling of the Olympic games. But if you did Google him, you might end up with the link provided here. So I’ve saved you a step.
TimBL, as he is sometimes known, invented the World Wide Web as we know it today. He was the first one to use a successful HTTP connection, he’s the head of the world W3C, which handles internet standards and planning (a huge deal), is an MIT professor, and worked for CERN to boot.
His contributions to what the Web is today have been so large that he was personally thanked and honored in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony in a bit trying to show the effect that the web has had on culture as a whole. He was there to tweet, live, “This is for everyone”, a statement that fills me with a certain amount of web-nationalistic pride.