From Ian Murdock's wikipedia page, the debian's founder: "He named Debian after his then-girlfriend (later wife) Debra Lynn, and himself (Deb and Ian).[3] They later married, had three children, and divorced in January 2008.[4]"
Sadly, Ian committed suicide in late 2015. It's great to see that the distro is still going strong.
I remember back around 2005, I missed meeting him by a ~week. My college Linux users group was having a birthday party for Debian, and Ian was an alumnus of that school, so he was going to attend. It was right before the semester started, so I was out of town.