Great read! For the same reason as Paul (i.e. it's fun) I'll put my own list here. Apart from the interesting fact that Paul is actually on - my - list (since long before I read this essay, really), so are some of his heroes so I guess that makes 'heroic devotion' transitive or heritable or whatever. In descending order of admiration:
Isaac Newton - apart from more or less inventing modern physics (he's up there with Maxwell and Einstein in my physics heroes top 3), he found he couldn't solve the fundamental equations he discovered, so he kinda invented modern maths to help with that. Sweet. As for my maths heroes top 3, that's completed with Gauss and Laplace because they did similar things but in a less earth-shattering way. After all it can happen only once to discover mechanics, gravity, the most powerful series around or differential calculus (but who'd have thought it'd be the same guy!).
Noel Gallagher, Paul McCartney - they are realllly smart and creative guys, and instead of caring too much about politics and the likes they just wrote a big pile of Shockingly Good Songs. They had a direct influence in me getting into music (songwriting), and not a month goes by without me fantasizing about becoming famous enough to meet Noel somewhere backstage and chat with him over a beer. In fact, more chance of meeting Noel - together with "playing at nicer venues" - is a big part of why fame in music attracts me. The top 3 is completed by Steve Jobs (really) for similar reasons. Another big reason of why fame attracts me stems from my next hero...
Bill Gates - he did not only cofound, ran and drove the software company that makes/made the best products in the world or that understands 'software' orders of magnitude better than anybody else ("it's usability, stupid"), he also now spends his days using his fortune, fame and brains to really try to make this world a better place. I cannot express in words how much I admire both facets of his life and if there's one answer to "if you could choose, where would you want to be in 20 years?" for me the answer is to be like Bill Gates, having made it big and using that to try and make the world a better place. I admire Bono, Warren Buffet and John Lennon for the same reason and very often find myself passionately defending all of these guys to others who slack them for sheer fame (at least that's why I think it is).
Joel & Paul - not only did they do A Really Good Job in software business themselves, they also are an ongoing source of inspiration for me and others because they write so well about it. Hacking by itself is not my passion, but somehow every other facet about software development/business is, and that's in large part because of the writings of these guys. Again, there's really a top 3 and it's completed by "all the others" (Stevey, Guy Kawasaki, the Rands, etc...).
By the way: I am a music-playing phycisist/mathematician working on software most of the time, as one might have guessed :-)
W.