Dennis Ritchie — American Scientist born on September 09, 1941,

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C and commonly known by his username dmr... (wikipedia)

At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.
I've done a reasonable amount of travelling, which I enjoyed, but not for too long at a time.
When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.