Donald Knuth is one of the legends of the computer science community. Unlike most others in the computer science community, his contributions are recognized as meaningful to all of science. He doesn't give interviews that often, but the NY Times got one and it's great.

For the last 50 years, Knuth has been working on 7 volume work, "The Art of Computer Programming". So far he has published the first three volumes, and part of the fourth.