You won't know who he was unless you're a software developer, and more specifically, not unless you've delved deeper into programming than creating Web pages.
Dennis Ritchie was one of the handful of AT&T engineers who came up with the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Unix took concepts like timesharing from the closed and proprietary world of mainframe computing, and brought them into what turned out to be an early and almost ridiculously successful portable operating system. Much of the portability of Unix was due to its having been written mostly in the C programming language rather than machine-specific assembly language (small pieces that interfaced most closely with the hardware still had to be written in assembly). C would later serve as the inspiration for other languages like Java, not to mention its mutant offspring C++ and Objective C. C also is hugely important in its own right: millions of lines of C code are behind critical software all over the world.
Unix and C were essentially skunkworks projects of no specific use to AT&T. The relatively easy licensing terms made Unix useful to universities for teaching and research. UC Berkeley developed its own Unix variant, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD eventually nurtured the development of the now-standard Internet Protocol (IP), the basis of all communication on the Internet. Unix and Ritchie, therefore, are partially responsible for your being able to read these words.
Boing Boing has a report on Ritchie's passing; like other reports I've seen, the source is Ritchie's longtime colleague Rob Pike's Google+ post. The Wikipedia pages on Ritchie, Unix, and C have more information on Ritchie's contributions to computer science.
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