The only person on the list whose work I'm somewhat aware of is Dan Spielman. His works, especially smoothed analysis, is definitely something that HN folks will appreciate.<p>Smoothed analysis answers the question why many popular algorithms have exponential big-O time but still work so well in practice. Average case complexity also answers that question but computing it requires us to know the probability distribution of the input space in advance. The idea of smoothed complexity is simply to add random perturbation to the input and then measure the worst case. Eg. simplex method has exponential big-O complexity but polynomial smoothed complexity.
For the computer science entry:<p>Daniel Spielman, Yale University Professor<p><a href="http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/" rel="nofollow">http://www.macfound.org/fellows/877/</a>
Junot Diaz was my writing teacher at MIT. "Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao." He's really into comic books, the apocalypse, Dominican immigrants, New Jersey.