The pioneers
First and foremost, a big thanks to John Conway for creating the Game of Life, and to Martin Gardner for popularizing the topic in his Scientific American column.
The programmers
Tom Rokicki wrote most of the complicated stuff. Golly is essentially the merging of two of Tom's programs (hlife and qlife). The hashing algorithm is based on an idea by Bill Gosper. The more conventional algorithm uses some ideas from Alan Hensel. David Eppstein provided the idea on how to emulate B0 rules.
Andrew Trevorrow wrote the cross-platform GUI code using wxWidgets. Much thanks to Julian Smart and all the other wxWidgets developers.
Golly's scripting capabilities were inspired by the generosity and efforts of Eugene Langvagen (author of PLife), Larry Wall (creator of Perl) and Guido van Rossum (creator of Python).
Jason Summers added mouse wheel support and other improvements.
If you'd like to join us and help make Golly the best Life/CA app in the known universe then please get in touch.
The beta testers
Thanks to all the bug hunters for their reports and suggestions, especially Gabriel Nivasch, Dean Hickerson, Brice Due, Dave Greene, David Eppstein, Tony Smith, Alan Hensel, Dennis Langdeau, Bill Gosper.
Other contributors
Dave Greene and Alan Hensel helped put together the pattern collection. Thanks to everybody who allowed us to distribute their fantastic patterns, especially Nick Gotts, Gabriel Nivasch, David Eppstein, Jason Summers, Stephen Morley, Dean Hickerson, Brice Due.
Stephen Silver compiled the Life Lexicon.