I nominate Shannon & Weaver (who pioneered information
theory), Von Neumann for many reasons (game theory, theory of
self-replicationg systems, etc.), Charles Turing (for his
test), Charles Sanders Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure and A. J.
Greimas (who provided the structural underpinnings (semiotics) for
the functional metaphor (memetics) - lesser lights include Louis
Hjelmslev, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, John Deely and
Umberto Eco), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who described the root
human situation of phenomenological ambiguity which permits the
existence and appropriation of multiple stable but mutually
exclusive memeplexes.
I also support the creation of a separate pantheon of fiction
writers such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Herman Hesse,
Stanislav Lem, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Anthony
Burgess, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jose Luis
Borges, John Barth, James Joyce, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas
Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, J. D. Salinger and Nikolai
Gogol, as literary uncles (feel free to add to this list).