ACM A.M. Turing Award winners for contributions related to programming
languages research:

2008: Barbara H. Liskov for the CLU programming language among other contributions.

2005 Peter Naur for compiler and language design and description methods such a
BNF grammars.

2003: Alan Kay for Smalltalk.
 	
1991: A.J. "Robin" Milner for the type systems and type inference in ML.

1986: John E. Hopcroft for formal languages.

1984: Niklaus E. Wirth for Pascal and a variety of other languages.

1983: Dennis W. Ritchie and Kenneth L. Thompson for UNIX and C.

1980: C.A.R. "Tony" Hoare for the design of concurrent programming languages.

1977: John Backus for language design and description methods such as BNF
grammars.

1971: John McCarthy for LISP.

Note: the contributions of these great computer scientists are vast and cannot
be reduced to a single sentence with justice to their research as is done
above. Here we simply focus on how their work relates to a programming
languages course in its most basic form.