383 Influential People who changed the world

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891 – 6 December 1956), also known as Babasaheb Ambedkar, was an Indian scholar, jurist, economist, politician and social reformer, who inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement and campaigned against social discrimination towards the untouchables (Dalits), while also...Read More

Ashoka, also known as Ashoka the Great, was an Indian emperor of the Maurya Dynasty, who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from c. 268 to 232 BCE. The grandson of the founder of the Maurya Dynasty, Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka promoted the spread of Buddhism across ancient Asia. Considered...Read More

The Buddha (also known as Siddhartha Gotama or Siddhārtha Gautama or Buddha Shakyamuni) was a philosopher, mendicant, meditator, spiritual teacher, and religious leader who lived in Ancient India (c. 5th to 4th century BCE). He is revered as the founder of the world religion of Buddhism, and worshipped...Read More

Lee Jun-fan (Chinese: 李振藩; November 27, 1940 – July 20, 1973), better known as Bruce Lee (Chinese: 李小龍), was a Hong Kong American martial artist, actor, director, martial arts instructor and philosopher. He was the founder of Jeet Kune Do, a hybrid martial arts philosophy drawing from...Read More

Abu’l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (October 1542– 27 October 1605), popularly known as Akbar the Great, (Akbar-i-azam اکبر اعظم), and also as Akbar I, was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Akbar succeeded his father, Humayun, under a regent, Bairam Khan, who helped the young emperor expand and consolidate Mughal domains in India. Akbar was succeeded as emperor by his son, Prince Salim, later known as Jahangir.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology,...Read More

Karl Heinrich Marx ( 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political...Read More

Adam Smith (c. 16 June [O.S. c. 5 June] 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist, philosopher as well as a moral philosopher, a pioneer of political economy, and a key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment, also known as ”The Father of Economics” or ”The Father of Capitalism”....Read More

Sigmund Freud ( FROYD, 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg,...Read More

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin (Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. Together with Larry Page, he co-founded Google. Brin was the president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping...Read More

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, software developer, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief...Read More

Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as one of the co-founders of Google along with Sergey Brin. Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 (stepping down in favor of Eric Schmidt) then...Read More

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist who made groundbreaking works in the field of light scattering. With his student K. S. Krishnan, he discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light change wavelength...Read More

Confucius ( 551–479 BC) was a Chinese philosopher and politician of the Spring and Autumn period who was traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages.
The philosophy of Confucius, also known as Confucianism, emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships,...Read More

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics (alongside quantum mechanics). His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He is best known to the general...Read More

Alexander Graham Bell ( March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885.Bell’s father, grandfather,...Read More

Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author (described in his own day as a “natural philosopher”) who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure...Read More

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was a British American polymath and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Franklin was a leading writer, printer, political philosopher, politician, Freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, humorist, civic...Read More

George Washington Carver (1860s – January 5, 1943) was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century.
While a professor at Tuskegee Institute,...Read More

Guru Nanak (born as Nanak on 15 April 1469 – 22 September 1539), also referred to as Baba Nanak (‘father Nanak’), was the founder of Sikhism and is the first of the ten Sikh Gurus. His birth is celebrated worldwide as Guru Nanak Gurpurab on Katak Pooranmashi (‘full-moon of the...Read More

Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian physicist, chemist, and pioneer of electricity and power who is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the Voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results...Read More

Ibn Sina, also known as Abu Ali Sina, Pur Sina, and often known in the West as Avicenna (c. 980 – June 1037), was a Persian polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, thinkers and writers of the Islamic Golden Age, and the father of early modern medicine....Read More

Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology.Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as “nebulae”...Read More

Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro, Count of Quaregna and Cerreto ( 9 August 1776 – 9 July 1856) was an Italian scientist, most noted for his contribution to molecular theory now known as Avogadro’s law, which states that equal volumes of gases under the same conditions of temperature and...Read More

John Bardeen (; May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer...Read More

John Dalton FRS ( 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He is best known for introducing the atomic theory into chemistry, and for his research into colour blindness, sometimes referred to as Daltonism in his honour. Dalton was the first scientist to use the term atom for the smallest particle of matter, which originated from Greek word ‘atomos’ meaning cannot be divided further.

Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet (17 December 1778 – 29 May 1829) was a Cornish chemist and inventor, who is best remembered today for isolating, by using electricity, a series of elements for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following...Read More

Linus Carl Pauling ( February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest...Read More

Blaise Pascal ( 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, writer and Catholic theologian.
He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal’s earliest mathematical work was on the conics sections;...Read More

Enrico Fermi ( 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian (later naturalized American) physicist and the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the “architect of the nuclear age” and the “architect of the atomic bomb”....Read More

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee...Read More

James Dewey Watson KBE (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology...Read More

Johannes Kepler ( 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer. He is a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae....Read More

John von Neumann ( December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. Von Neumann was generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and said to be “the last representative of the great mathematicians”. He integrated pure and applied sciences.

Charles Robert Darwin ( 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. His proposition that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors is now widely accepted, and considered...Read More

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). Like all New Zealanders...Read More

Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz ( 1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a prominent German polymath and one of the most important logicians, mathematicians and natural philosophers of the Enlightenment. As a representative of the seventeenth-century tradition of rationalism, Leibniz...Read More

James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish scientist in the field of mathematical physics. His most notable achievement was to formulate the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as different...Read More

Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek ( 24 October 1632 – 26 August 1723) was a Dutch businessman and scientist in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology. A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as “the Father of Microbiology”, and one of the first microscopists...Read More

Mahavira, also known as Vardhamana or Kevala was the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism. He was the spiritual successor of 23rd Tirthankara Parshvanatha. Mahavira was born in the early part of the 6th century BC into a royal Kshatriya Jain family in Bihar, India. His mother’s name was Trishala and...Read More

Rajneesh (born Chandra Mohan Jain, 11 December 1931 – 19 January 1990), also known as Acharya Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, and later as Osho, was an Indian godman, mystic, and founder of the Rajneesh movement.
During his lifetime, he was viewed as a controversial new religious movement...Read More

Ambroise Paré (c. 1510 – 20 December 1590) was a French barber surgeon who served in that role for kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. He is considered one of the fathers of surgery and modern forensic pathology and a pioneer in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine, especially...Read More

Andreas Vesalius (; 31 December 1514 – 15 October 1564) was a 16th-century anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (On the fabric of the human body in seven books). Vesalius is often referred to as the founder...Read More

André-Marie Ampère (UK: , US: ; French: [ɑ̃pɛʁ]; 20 January 1775 – 10 June 1836) was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as “electrodynamics”. He is also the inventor of numerous applications,...Read More

Antoine Henri Becquerel (; 15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French engineer, physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover evidence of radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Skłodowska-Curie (Marie Curie) and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him.

Catherine II (born Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst; 2 May 1729 in Stettin – 17 November 1796 in Saint Petersburg), most commonly known as Catherine the Great, was Empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796 – the country’s longest-ruling female leader. She came to power following a coup d’état...Read More

Charles Babbage (; 26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.Babbage is considered by some to be “father of the computer”. Babbage is credited...Read More

Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, The Tramp, and is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the...Read More

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (sometimes transliterated as Mendeleyev or Mendeleef) (English: MEN-dəl-AY-əf; Russian: Дмитрий Иванович Менделеев, tr. Dmitriy Ivanovich Mendeleyev, IPA: [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ mʲɪnʲdʲɪˈlʲejɪf] (listen); 8 February 1834 – 2...Read More

Dorothea Lynde Dix (April 4, 1802 – July 17, 1887) was an American advocate on behalf of the indigent mentally ill who, through a vigorous and sustained program of lobbying state legislatures and the United States Congress, created the first generation of American mental asylums. During the Civil War, she served as a Superintendent of Army Nurses.

Edward Jenner, (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines including creating the smallpox vaccine, the world’s first ever vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae (‘smallpox of the...Read More

Elias Howe Jr. (; July 9, 1819 – October 3, 1867) was an American inventor best known for his creation of the modern lockstitch sewing machine.

Emmeline Pankhurst (née Goulden; 15 July 1858 – 14 June 1928) was an English political activist. She is best remembered for organizing the UK suffragette movement and helping women win the right to vote. In 1999, Time named her as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating...Read More

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (; American Spanish: [fiˈðel aleˈxandɾo ˈkastɾo ˈrus]; 13 August 1926 – 25 November 2016) was a Cuban revolutionary, lawyer, and politician who was the leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008, serving as the prime minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976 and president from 1976...Read More

Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright believed in designing in harmony with humanity and the environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture....Read More

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1817 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and...Read More

Fritz Haber (German: [ˈhaːbɐ]; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance...Read More

Georg Simon Ohm (, German: [ˈɡeːɔʁk ˈʔoːm]; 16 March 1789 – 6 July 1854) was a German physicist and mathematician. As a school teacher, Ohm began his research with the new electrochemical cell, invented by Italian scientist Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm found...Read More

George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799) was an American political leader, military general, statesman, and Founding Father, who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of the Continental Army, Washington...Read More

Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi (Italian: [ɡuʎˈʎɛlmo marˈkoːni]; 25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937) was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his creation of a practical radio wave based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as...Read More

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and hearing after a bout of illness at the age of nineteen months. She then communicated primarily using home...Read More

Henry Cavendish FRS (; 10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was an English natural philosopher, scientist, and an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. He is noted for his discovery of hydrogen, which he termed “inflammable air”. He described the density of inflammable...Read More

Hideki Yukawa (湯川 秀樹, Yukawa Hideki, 23 January 1907 – 8 September 1981) was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate for his prediction of the pi meson, or pion.

Hippocrates of Kos (; Greek: Ἱπποκράτης ὁ Κῷος, translit. Hippokrátēs ho Kôios; c. 460 – c. 370 BC), also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician of the Age of Pericles (Classical Greece), who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine....Read More

Homer (; Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος [hómɛːros], Hómēros) was the reputed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epic poems that are the foundational works of ancient Greek literature. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential writers of all time.The Iliad is set during...Read More

Joanne Rowling ( ROH-ling; born 31 July 1965), better known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author, philanthropist, film producer, television producer, and screenwriter. She is best known for writing the Harry Potter fantasy series, which has won multiple awards and sold more than 500...Read More

J. Robert Oppenheimer (; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist who was professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the “father...Read More

Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites and Brandenburg Concertos; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations, The Well-Tempered Clavier...Read More

Sir James Chadwick, (20 October 1891 – 24 July 1974) was a British physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atomic bomb research efforts....Read More

James Prescott Joule (; 24 December 1818 – 11 October 1889) was an English physicist, mathematician and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work (see energy). This led to the law of conservation of energy, which in...Read More

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Best known for his wartime leadership as Prime Minister, Churchill was...Read More

Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856 – February 3, 1924) was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey...Read More

John Harrison (3 April [O.S. 24 March] 1693 – 24 March 1776) was a self-educated English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea.
Harrison’s solution revolutionized navigation...Read More

Jonas Edward Salk (; born Jonas Salk; October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.In...Read More

Joseph Black (16 April 1728 – 6 December 1799) was a Scottish physicist and chemist, known for his discoveries of magnesium, latent heat, specific heat, and carbon dioxide. He was Professor of Anatomy and Chemistry at the University of Glasgow for 10 years from 1756, and then Professor of Medicine...Read More

Joseph Lister, Baron Lister of Lyme Regis (5 April 1827 – 10 February 1912), was a British surgeon, experimental pathologist and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery. From a technical viewpoint, Lord Lister was not an exceptional surgeon, but his research into bacteriology and infection in wounds raised...Read More

Karl Landsteiner (German: [kaʁl ˈlantˌʃtaɪnɐ]; 14 June 1868 – 26 June 1943) was an Austrian biologist, physician, and immunologist. He distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of...Read More

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 1887 – 27 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier (UK: lə kor-BEW-zee-ay, US: lə KOR-boo-ZYAY, -⁠SYAY, French: [lə kɔʁbyzje]; roughly, “the crow-like one”), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the...Read More

Leo Hendrik Baekeland
(November 14, 1863 – February 23, 1944) was a Belgian chemist. He is best known for the inventions of Velox photographic paper in 1893, and Bakelite in 1907. He has been called “The Father of the Plastics Industry”: 13  for his invention of Bakelite, an inexpensive, nonflammable and versatile plastic, which marked the beginning of the modern plastics industry.

Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called...Read More

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (; German pronunciation: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁœntɡən] (listen); 27 March 1845 – 10 February 1923) was a German mechanical engineer and physicist, who, on 8 November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays,...Read More

Sir Frederick William Herschel (; German: Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel; 15 November 1738 – 25 August 1822) was a German-born British astronomer and composer. He frequently collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750–1848). Born in the Electorate of...Read More

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (26 June 1824 – 17 December 1907) was a British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and...Read More

Louis Braille ( (listen); French: [lwi bʁaj]; 4 January 1809 – 6 January 1852) was a French educator and inventor of a reading and writing system for use by people who are visually impaired. His system remains virtually unchanged to this day, and is known worldwide simply as braille.
Braille...Read More

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights through nonviolence...Read More

Mary Somerville (née Fairfax, formerly Greig; 26 December 1780 – 29 November 1872) was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she was elected together with Caroline Herschel as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.Read More

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), baptised as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period.
Born in Salzburg, in the Holy Roman Empire, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood....Read More

Muhammad Ali (; born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer, activist, entertainer, poet, and philanthropist. Nicknamed The Greatest, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant and celebrated figures of the 20th century, and is frequently...Read More

Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer, and the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor.
Armstrong was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio. A graduate of Purdue...Read More

Nicolaus August Otto (10 June 1832, Holzhausen an der Haide, Nassau – 26 January 1891, Cologne) was a German engineer who successfully developed the compressed charge internal combustion engine which ran on petroleum gas and led to the modern internal combustion engine. The Association of German...Read More

Norman Ernest Borlaug (; March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize,...Read More

The Wright brothers – Orville (August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948) and Wilbur (April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912) – were two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world’s first successful motor-operated airplane. They made the first controlled,...Read More

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention...Read More

Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975) was an American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine and was a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the...Read More

Vilhelm Friman Koren Bjerknes ( BYURK-niss, Norwegian: [ˈbjæ̂rkneːs]; 14 March 1862 – 9 April 1951) was a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who did much to found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He formulated the primitive equations that are still in use in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, and he developed the so-called Bergen School of Meteorology, which was successful in advancing weather prediction and meteorology in the early 20th century.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsənt ˈʋɪləm vɑŋ ˈɣɔx] (listen); 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including...Read More

Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel (German: [ˈdiːzl̩] (listen); 18 March 1858 – 29 September 1913) was a German inventor and mechanical engineer who is famous for having invented the Diesel engine. Diesel was the namesake of the 1942 film Diesel.

Satyendra Nath Bose (1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian mathematician and physicist specialising in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, collaborating with Albert Einstein in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics...Read More

Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (Russian: Софья Васильевна Ковалевская), born Korvin-Krukovskaya (15 January [O.S. 3 January] 1850 – 10 February 1891), was a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics....Read More

Marie-Sophie Germain (French: [maʁi sɔfi ʒɛʁmɛ̃]; 1 April 1776 – 27 June 1831) was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father’s library, including...Read More

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (born May 14, 1984) is an American media magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding Facebook, Inc. and serves as its chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder. He also is a co-founder of the solar sail spacecraft development...Read More

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is an American internet entrepreneur, industrialist, media proprietor, and investor. He is best known as the founder, CEO, and president of the multi-national technology company Amazon. The first centi-billionaire on the Forbes wealth index, Bezos has...Read More

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Gerardus Mercator (; 5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594) was a 16th-century geographer, cosmographer and cartographer from the County of Flanders. He is most renowned for creating the 1569 world map based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing (rhumb lines) as straight lines—an innovation that is still employed in nautical charts.

My Father and My Son is a 2005 Turkish drama film written and directed by Çağan Irmak about a family torn apart by the 1980 Turkish coup d’état. The film which went on nationwide release on 18 November 2005 became one of the highest-grossing Turkish films in history.

ʻAbdu’l-Bahá (; Persian: عبد البهاء‎, 23 May 1844 – 28 November 1921), born ʻAbbás (Persian: عباس‎), was the eldest son of Baháʼu’lláh and served as head of the Baháʼí Faith from 1892 until 1921. ʻAbdu’l-Bahá was later canonized as the last of three...Read More

Abraham Darby, in his later life called Abraham Darby the Elder, now sometimes known for convenience as Abraham Darby I (14 April 1677 – 5 May 1717), was the first and best known of several men of that name. Born into an English Quaker family that played an important role in the Industrial Revolution,...Read More

Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī (Arabic: أبو بكر محمد بن زكرياء الرازي‎), also known by his Latinized name Rhazes), 864 or 865 – 925 or 935 CE, was a Persian physician, philosopher and alchemist, widely considered one of the most important figures in the...Read More

Alphonse Gabriel Capone (; January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), sometimes known by the nickname “Scarface”, was an American gangster and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit. His seven-year reign as a crime boss...Read More

Alexander III of Macedon (Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος, Aléxandros; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon. A member of the Argead dynasty, he was born in Pella—a city in Ancient Greece—in 356 BC. He...Read More

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835)....Read More

Alfred the Great (848/49 – 26 October 899) was king of the West Saxons from 871 to c. 886 and king of the Anglo-Saxons from c. 886 to 899. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf, who died when Alfred was young. Three of Alfred’s brothers, Æthelbald, Æthelberht and Æthelred, reigned...Read More

Andrew Stephen Grove (born András István Gróf; 2 September 1936 – 21 March 2016) was a Hungarian-American businessman, engineer, and CEO of Intel Corporation. He escaped from Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20 and moved to the United States, where he finished his education. He was...Read More

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (French: [ɑ̃twan lɔʁɑ̃ də lavwazje] UK: lav-WUZ-ee-ay, US: lə-VWAH-zee-ay,; 26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794), also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had...Read More

The Lumière brothers (UK: , US: ; French: [lymjɛːʁ]), Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (19 October 1862 – 10 April 1954) and Louis Jean Lumière (5 October 1864 – 6 June 1948), were manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the...Read More

Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz ( KAY-kə-lay, German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈʔaʊɡʊst ˈkeːkuleː fɔn ʃtʁaˈdoːnɪts]; 7 September 1829 – 13 July 1896), was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure and in particular the Kekulé structure of benzene.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine...Read More

Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy (; French: [oɡystɛ̃ lwi koʃi]; 21 August 1789 – 23 May 1857) was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He was one of the first...Read More

Caesar Augustus (23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14), also known as Octavian, was the first Roman emperor, reigning from 27 BC until his death in AD 14. His status as the founder of the Roman Principate (the first phase of the Roman Empire) has consolidated a legacy as one of the most effective...Read More

Babur (Persian: بابر‎, romanized: Bābur, lit. ’tiger’; 14 February 1483 – 26 December 1530), born Zahīr ud-Dīn Muhammad, was the founder of the Mughal Empire and first Emperor of the Mughal dynasty (r. 1526–1530) in the Indian subcontinent. He was a descendant of Timur and...Read More

Betty Friedan ( February 4, 1921 – February 4, 2006) was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women’s movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In...Read More

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; German: Gauß [kaʁl ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈɡaʊs] (listen); Latin: Carolus Fridericus Gauss; 30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes referred to...Read More

Carl Gustav Jung ( YUUNG; born Karl Gustav Jung, German: [kaʁl ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy,...Read More

Caroline Lucretia Herschel (; 16 March 1750 – 9 January 1848) was a German astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name. She was the younger sister of astronomer William...Read More

Charlemagne (English: SHAR-lə-mayn, -⁠MAYN, French: [ʃaʁləmaɲ]) or Charles the Great (Latin: Carolus Magnus; 2 April 748 – 28 January 814), numbered Charles I, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor of the Romans from 800. During the Early Middle Ages,...Read More

Charles Richard Drew (June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950) was an American surgeon and medical researcher. He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. This...Read More

Charles Goodyear (December 29, 1800 – July 1, 1860) was an American self-taught chemist and manufacturing engineer who developed vulcanized rubber, for which he received patent number 3633 from the United States Patent Office on June 15, 1844.Goodyear is credited with inventing the chemical process...Read More

Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, (14 November 1797 – 22 February 1875) was a Scottish geologist who demonstrated the power of known natural causes in explaining the earth’s history. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology (1830–33), which presented to a wide public audience...Read More

Ernesto “Che” Guevara (Spanish: [ˈtʃe ɣeˈβaɾa]; 14 June 1928 – 9 October 1967) was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a ubiquitous countercultural...Read More

Chien-Shiung Wu (Chinese: 吳健雄; May 31, 1912 – February 16, 1997) was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating...Read More

Christiaan Huygens ( HY-gənz, also US: HOY-gənz, Dutch: [ˈkrɪstijaːn ˈɦœyɣə(n)s] (listen); Latin: Hugenius; 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695), also spelled Huyghens, was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, astronomer and inventor, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all...Read More

Christopher Latham Sholes (February 14, 1819 – February 17, 1890) was an American inventor who invented the QWERTY keyboard, and, along with Samuel W. Soule, Carlos Glidden and John Pratt, has been contended to be one of the inventors of the first typewriter in the United States. He was also a newspaper...Read More

Clarissa Harlowe Barton (December 25, 1821 – April 12, 1912) was an American nurse who founded the American Red Cross. She was a hospital nurse in the American Civil War, a teacher, and a patent clerk. Since nursing education was not then very formalized and she did not attend nursing school, she...Read More

Clarence Birdseye (December 9, 1886 – October 7, 1956) was an American inventor, entrepreneur, and naturalist, considered the founder of the modern frozen food industry. One of nine children, Birdseye grew up in Brooklyn before heading to Amherst College and began his scientific career with the U.S. government. Among his inventions during his career was the double belt freezer. A biography of his life was published by Doubleday over a half century after his death.

Cleopatra VII Philopator (Koinē Greek: Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ; 69 BC – 10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, and its last active ruler. A member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion...Read More

Constantine I (Latin: Flavius Valerius Constantinus; Greek: Κωνσταντῖνος, translit. Kōnstantînos; 27 February c. 272 – 22 May 337), also known as Constantine the Great, was Roman emperor from 306 to 337. Born in Naissus, Dacia Mediterranea (now Niš, Serbia), he was the son of Flavius...Read More

Cyrus West Field (November 30, 1819 – July 12, 1892) was an American businessman and financier who, along with other entrepreneurs, created the Atlantic Telegraph Company and laid the first telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.

Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (Japanese: 鈴木 大拙 貞太郎, romanized: Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō; he rendered his name “Daisetz” in 1894; 11 November 1870 – 12 July 1966) was a Japanese scholar and author of books and essays on Buddhism, Zen (Chan) and Shin that were instrumental in spreading...Read More

Daniel Joseph Berrigan (May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016) was an American Jesuit priest, anti-war activist, Christian pacifist, playwright, poet, and author.
Berrigan’s active protest against the Vietnam War earned him both scorn and admiration, especially regarding his association with...Read More

Daniel Hale Williams (January 18, 1856 – August 4, 1931) was an American general surgeon, who in 1893 performed what is referred to as “the first successful heart surgery”. In 1913, Williams was elected as the only African-American charter member of the American College of Surgeons.His...Read More

Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997), also known by his courtesy name Xixian (希贤), was a Chinese revolutionary and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976,...Read More

Theodor Seuss Geisel ( (listen); March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American children’s author, political cartoonist, illustrator, poet, animator, and filmmaker. He is known for his work writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Dr. Seuss (,). His work includes...Read More

Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku (August 24, 1890 – January 22, 1968) was a competition swimmer who popularized the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing. A Native Hawaiian, he was born to a minor noble family less than three years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. He lived to...Read More

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, (1 May 1769 – 14 September 1852) was an Anglo-Irish soldier and Tory statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain, serving twice as prime minister. He is one of the commanders who won and ended the Napoleonic...Read More

Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower (; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe,...Read More

Edmond (or Edmund) Halley, FRS (; 8 November [O.S. 29 October] 1656 – 25 January 1742 [O.S. 14 January 1742]) was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, succeeding John Flamsteed in 1720.
From an observatory...Read More

Elena Delle Donne (born September 5, 1989) is an American professional basketball player for the Washington Mystics of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). Delle Donne played college basketball for the Delaware Blue Hens from 2009 to 2013. She was drafted by the Chicago Sky with...Read More

Eli Whitney Jr. (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.Whitney’s invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop,...Read More

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (Russian: Илья Ильич Мечников, also written as Elie Metchnikoff; 15 May [O.S. 3 May] 1845 – 15 July 1916) was a Russian Imperial zoologist of Romanian nobility ancestry and Ukrainian Jewish origin best known for his pioneering research in immunology. He and...Read More

Elizabeth Blackwell (February 3, 1821 – May 31, 1910) was a British physician, notable as the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, and the first woman on the Medical Register of the General Medical Council. Blackwell played an important role in both the United States and...Read More

Ellen Lee DeGeneres ( də-JEN-ər-əs; born January 26, 1958) is an American comedian, television host, actress, writer, and producer. She starred in the sitcom Ellen from 1994 to 1998 and has hosted her syndicated television talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, since 2003.
Her stand-up career...Read More

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (born Ellen Eugenia Johnson, 29 October 1938) is a Liberian politician who served as the 24th President of Liberia from 2006 to 2018. Sirleaf was the first elected female head of state in Africa.
Sirleaf was born in Monrovia to a Gola father and Kru-German mother. She was...Read More

Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was an industrial and safety engineer, environmental chemist, and university faculty member in the United States during the 19th century. Her pioneering work in sanitary engineering, and experimental research in domestic science,...Read More

Elon Reeve Musk ( EE-lon; born June 28, 1971) is an entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. A centibillionaire, Musk...Read More

Emily Warren Roebling (September 23, 1843 – February 28, 1903) was an engineer known for her contributions over a period of more than 10 years to the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband Washington Roebling developed caisson disease (a.k.a. decompression disease) and became bedridden....Read More

Amalie Emmy Noether (US: /ˈnʌtər/, UK: /ˈnɜːtə/ NUR-tər; German: 23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935) was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She discovered Noether’s theorem, which is fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by...Read More

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (; Greek: Ἐρατοσθένης [eratostʰénɛːs]; c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC) was a Greek polymath: a mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His work is comparable...Read More

Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and sportsman. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and his public...Read More

Euclid (; Ancient Greek: Εὐκλείδης – Eukleídēs, pronounced [eu̯.kleː.dɛːs]; fl. 300 BC), sometimes called Euclid of Alexandria to distinguish him from Euclid of Megara, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the “founder of geometry” or the “father of geometry”....Read More

Evangelista Torricelli ( TORR-ee-CHEL-ee, also US: TOR-, Italian: [evandʒeˈlista torriˈtʃɛlli] (listen); 15 October 1608 – 25 October 1647) was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles.

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and as Lord Chancellor of England. His works are seen as developing the scientific method and remained influential through...Read More

Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 – March 21, 1915) was an American mechanical engineer. He was widely known for his methods to improve industrial efficiency. He was one of the first management consultants. In 1911, Taylor summed up his efficiency techniques in his book The Principles of...Read More

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (; 1866-1877 – 29 October 1949) was a Russian philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent, born in Alexandropol, Russian Empire (now Gyumri, Armenia). Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus...Read More

Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus (Greek: Κλαύδιος Γαληνός; September 129 – c. 216 CE), often Anglicized as Galen () or Galen of Pergamon, was a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire. Considered to be one of the most accomplished of all medical researchers...Read More

Genghis Khan (c. 1158 – August 18, 1227), born Temüjin, was the founder and first Great Khan (Emperor) of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death. He came to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of Northeast Asia. After founding the Empire...Read More

Georg von Békésy (Hungarian: Békésy György, Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈbeːkeːʃi]; 3 June 1899 – 13 June 1972) was a Hungarian biophysicist.By using strobe photography and silver flakes as a marker, he was able to observe that the basilar membrane moves like a surface wave when stimulated...Read More

George Eastman (July 12, 1854 – March 14, 1932) was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. Roll film was also the basis for the invention of motion picture film stock in 1888 by filmmakers Eadweard...Read More

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, biting social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.As a...Read More

George Stephenson (9 June 1781 – 12 August 1848) was a British civil engineer and mechanical engineer. Renowned as the “Father of Railways”, Stephenson was considered by the Victorians a great example of diligent application and thirst for improvement. Self-help advocate Samuel Smiles...Read More

Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier (French: [kyvje]; 23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the “founding father of paleontology”. Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the...Read More

Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi ( GARR-ib-AWL-dee, Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe ɡariˈbaldi] (listen); 4 July 1807 – 2 June 1882) was an Italian general, patriot, revolutionary, and republican. He contributed to the Italian unification and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. He is considered one of the greatest...Read More

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (née Murray December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. Hopper...Read More

Gregory Goodwin Pincus (April 9, 1903 – August 22, 1967) was an American biologist and researcher who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.

Haile Selassie I (Ge’ez: ቀዳማዊ ኀይለ ሥላሴ, romanized: Qädamawi Häylä Səllasé, Amharic pronunciation: [ˈhaɪlə sɨlˈlase] (listen); born Tafari Makonnen; 23 July 1892 – 27 August 1975) was Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. Prior to his coronation, he had been the...Read More

Hammurabi (c. 1810 – c. 1750 BC) was the sixth king of the First Babylonian dynasty of the Amorite tribe, reigning from c. 1792 BC to c. 1750 BC (according to the Middle Chronology). He was preceded by his father, Sin-Muballit, who abdicated due to failing health. During his reign, he conquered...Read More

George Boole (; 2 November 1815 – 8 December 1864) was a largely self-taught English mathematician, philosopher, and logician, most of whose short career was spent as the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, Cork in Ireland. He worked in the fields of differential equations...Read More

Hannibal (; Punic: 𐤇𐤍𐤁𐤏𐤋𐤟𐤁𐤓𐤒, Ḥannibaʿl Baraq; 247 – between 183 and 181 BC) was a Carthaginian general and statesman who commanded the forces of Carthage in their battle with the Roman Republic during the Second Punic War.
Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca,...Read More

Harriet Brooks (July 2, 1876 – April 17, 1933) was the first Canadian female nuclear physicist. She is most famous for her research on nuclear transmutations and radioactivity. Ernest Rutherford, who guided her graduate work, regarded her as comparable to Marie Curie in the calibre of her aptitude. She was among the first persons to discover radon and to try to determine its atomic mass.

Harry Hammond Hess (May 24, 1906 – August 25, 1969) was an American geologist and a United States Navy officer in World War II who is considered one of the “founding fathers” of the unifying theory of plate tectonics. He is best known for his theories on sea floor spreading, specifically...Read More

Zuriel Elise Oduwole is an American education advocate and film maker best known for her works on the advocacy for the education of girls in Africa. Her advocacy has since made her in the summer of 2013 at the age of 10, the youngest person to be profiled by Forbes. In November 2014, at age 12, Zuriel...Read More

Paul Ehrlich (German: [ˈpʰaʊ̯l ˈeːɐ̯lɪç] (listen); 14 March 1854 – 20 August 1915) was a Nobel Prize-winning German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy. Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis...Read More

Jules Henri Poincaré (UK: [US: stress final syllable], French: [ɑ̃ʁi pwɛ̃kaʁe] (listen); 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as “The Last Universalist”,...Read More

Henry Louis Le Chatelier (French pronunciation: ​[ɑ̃ʁi lwi lə ʃɑtlje]; 8 October 1850 – 17 September 1936) was a French chemist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He devised Le Chatelier’s principle, used by chemists and chemical engineers to predict the effect a changing condition has on a system in chemical equilibrium.

Sir Henry Bessemer (19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898) was an English inventor, whose steel-making process would become the most important technique for making steel in the nineteenth century for almost one hundred years from 1856 to 1950. He also played a significant role in establishing the town...Read More

Henry Dunant (born Jean-Henri Dunant; 8 May 1828 – 30 October 1910), also known as Henri Dunant, was a Swiss Christian, humanitarian, businessman and social activist. He was the visionary, promoter and co-founder and father of the Red Cross. In 1901, he received the first Nobel Peace Prize together...Read More

Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, 1st Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca (; Spanish: [eɾˈnaŋ koɾˈtez ðe monˈroj i piˈθaro altamiˈɾano]; 1485 – December 2, 1547) was a Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions...Read More

Hideyo Noguchi (野口 英世, Noguchi Hideyo, November 9, 1876 – May 21, 1928), also known as Seisaku Noguchi (野口 清作, Noguchi Seisaku), was a prominent Japanese bacteriologist who in 1911 discovered the agent of syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease.

Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, lawyer, writer, and public speaker who served as the 67th United States secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, as a United States senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and as first lady of the United States...Read More

Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté, (29 September 1758 – 21 October 1805), also known simply as Admiral Nelson, was an English flag officer in the Royal Navy. His inspirational leadership, grasp of strategy, and unconventional tactics brought about a number of...Read More

Howard Hathaway Aiken (March 8, 1900 – March 14, 1973) was an American physicist and a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM’s Harvard Mark I computer.

Hugo Junkers (3 February 1859 – 3 February 1935) was a German aircraft engineer and aircraft designer who pioneered the design of all-metal airplanes and flying wings. His company, Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG (Junkers Aircraft and Motor Works), was one of the mainstays of the German aircraft...Read More

Huston Cummings Smith (May 31, 1919 – December 30, 2016) was a leading scholar of religious studies in the United States. He was widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential figures in religious studies. He authored at least thirteen books on world’s religions and philosophy,...Read More

Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Although...Read More

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (German: [ˈɪɡnaːts ˈzɛml̩vaɪs]; Hungarian: Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp [ˈsɛmmɛlvɛjs ˈiɡnaːts ˈfyløp]; 1 July 1818 – 13 August 1865) was a Hungarian physician and scientist, now known as an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures. Described as the “saviour...Read More

Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky (Russian: И́горь Ива́нович Сико́рский, tr. Ígor’ Ivánovič Sikórskij; May 25, 1889 – October 26, 1972) was a Russian–American aviation pioneer in both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. His first success came with the S-2, the second...Read More

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June [O.S. 5 June] 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.
Stravinsky’s...Read More

Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (born October 4, 1982) is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district since 2019. She is a member of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. Before her election to Congress, Omar served in the Minnesota House of Representatives...Read More

Isabella I (Spanish: Isabel I, 22 April 1451 – 26 November 1504) was Queen of Castile from 1474 until she died in 1504, reigning over a dynastically unified Spain jointly with her husband, King Ferdinand II of Aragon. She was Queen of Aragon after Ferdinand ascended in 1479. Together they are known...Read More

Badīʿ az-Zaman Abu l-ʿIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-Jazarī (1136–1206, Arabic: بديع الزمان أَبُ اَلْعِزِ إبْنُ إسْماعِيلِ إبْنُ الرِّزاز الجزري‎,), IPA: [ældʒæzæriː]) was a Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer,...Read More

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Russian: Ива́н Петро́вич Па́влов, IPA: [ɪˈvan pʲɪˈtrovʲɪtɕ ˈpavləf] (listen); 26 September [O.S. 14 September] 1849 – 27 February 1936) was a Russian physiologist known primarily for his work in classical conditioning.
From his childhood...Read More

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and...Read More

Jacob August Riis (; May 3, 1849 – May 26, 1914) was a Danish-American social reformer, “muckraking” journalist and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic...Read More

Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also UK: , French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the Aqua-Lung,...Read More

Jacob Bernoulli (also known as James or Jacques; 6 January 1655 [O.S. 27 December 1654] – 16 August 1705) was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus and sided with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz during the Leibniz–Newton calculus...Read More

Sir James Dyson (born 2 May 1947) is a British inventor, industrial designer, farmer and billionaire entrepreneur who founded Dyson Ltd. He is best known as the inventor of the dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner, which works on the principle of cyclonic separation. According to the Sunday Times Rich...Read More

James Hargreaves (c. 1720 – 22 April 1778) was an English weaver, carpenter and inventor who lived and worked in Lancashire, England. He was one of three men responsible for the mechanisation of spinning: Hargreaves is credited with inventing the spinning jenny in 1764; Richard Arkwright patented the water frame in 1769; and Samuel Crompton combined the two, creating the spinning mule in 1779.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, short story writer, poet, teacher, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce is...Read More

Jane Cooke Wright (also known as “Jane Jones” or “Mrs Jane Jones”) (November 20, 1919 – February 19, 2013) was a pioneering cancer researcher and surgeon noted for her contributions to chemotherapy. In particular, Wright is credited with developing the technique of using...Read More

Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet (French: [ʒɑ̃ mɔnɛ]; 9 November 1888 – 16 March 1979) was a French entrepreneur, diplomat, financier, administrator, and political visionary. An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered one of the founding fathers of the European Union.
Jean...Read More

Joan of Arc (French: Jeanne d’Arc pronounced [ʒan daʁk]; c. 1412 – 30 May 1431), nicknamed “The Maid of Orléans” (French: La Pucelle d’Orléans), is considered a heroine of France for her role during the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years’ War, and was canonized...Read More

John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (July 8, 1839 – May 23, 1937) was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is widely considered the wealthiest American of all time and the richest person in modern history.Rockefeller was born into a large and poor family in upstate New York that moved several...Read More

William Joseph Seymour (May 2, 1870 – September 28, 1922) was an African-American holiness preacher who initiated the Azusa Street Revival, an influential event in the rise of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. He was the second of eight children born to emancipated slaves and raised Catholic...Read More

William Jaird Levitt (February 11, 1907 – January 28, 1994) was an American real-estate developer and housing pioneer. As president of Levitt & Sons, he is widely credited as the father of modern American suburbia. He was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century.”

William Thomas Green Morton (August 9, 1819 – July 15, 1868) was an American dentist and physician who first publicly demonstrated the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic in 1846. The promotion of his questionable claim to have been the discoverer of anesthesia became an obsession for the rest of his life.

William Tyndale (; sometimes spelled Tynsdale, Tindall, Tindill, Tyndall; c. 1494 – c. 6 October 1536) was an English scholar who became a leading figure in the Protestant Reformation in the years leading up to his execution. He is well known as a translator of the Bible into English, influenced...Read More

William Wilberforce (24 August 1759 – 29 July 1833) was a British politician, philanthropist, and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, eventually becoming an independent Member of Parliament (MP) for...Read More

Meshullam Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (28 August 1924 – 3 July 2014), commonly called “Reb Zalman” (full Hebrew name: Meshullam Zalman Hiyya ben Chaya Gittel veShlomo HaCohen), was one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal movement and an innovator in ecumenical dialogue.

John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter, musician and peace activist who achieved worldwide fame as the founder, co-songwriter, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His songwriting partnership with Paul...Read More

John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American statesman and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia’s 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020. He was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating...Read More

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( KAYNZ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was an English economist, whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier...Read More

Takamine Jōkichi (高峰 譲吉, November 3, 1854 – July 22, 1922) was a Japanese chemist. His most important achievement was the isolation of the chemical adrenalin (now called epinephrine) from the suprarenal gland (1901). This was the first pure hormone to be isolated from natural sources.

Joseph Bramah (13 April 1748 – 9 December 1814), born Stainborough Lane Farm, Stainborough, Barnsley Yorkshire, was an English inventor and locksmith. He is best known for having invented the hydraulic press. Along with William George Armstrong, he can be considered one of the two fathers of hydraulic engineering.

Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell’s best-known work is his book The Hero with...Read More

Joseph Priestley (; 24 March 1733 – 6 February 1804) was an English chemist, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator, and liberal political theorist who published over 150 works. He has historically been credited with the independent discovery of oxygen in...Read More

Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (Hebrew: יוסף דב הלוי סולובייצ׳יק‎ Yosef Dov ha-Levi Soloveychik; February 27, 1903 – April 9, 1993) was a major American Orthodox rabbi, Talmudist, and modern Jewish philosopher. He was a scion of the Lithuanian Jewish Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty.Read More

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (UK: , US: , French: [ʒɔzɛf lwi ɡɛlysak]; 6 December 1778 – 9 May 1850) was a French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for his discovery that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (with Alexander von Humboldt), for two laws related to gases, and for his work on alcohol–water mixtures, which led to the degrees Gay-Lussac used to measure alcoholic beverages in many countries.

Jules Gabriel Verne (; French: [ʒyl gabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey...Read More

Gaius Julius Caesar (Latin: [ˈɡaːiʊs ˈjuːliʊs ˈkae̯sar]; 12 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating Pompey in a civil war and governing the Roman Republic as a dictator...Read More

Creola Katherine Johnson (née Coleman; August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020) was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor,...Read More

Kelvin Doe (born October 26, 1996, in Freetown, Sierra Leone), also known as DJ Focus, is a Sierra Leonean engineer. He is known for teaching himself engineering at the age of 12 and building his own radio station in Sierra Leone, where he plays music and broadcasts news under the name “DJ Focus.”...Read More

Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born January 31, 1949) is an American philosopher and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a philosophy which suggests the synthesis of all human knowledge and experience.

Khufu (, full name Khnum Khufu , known to the ancient Greeks as Cheops; Old Egyptian: ḫw.f-wj; /χawˈjafwij/) was an ancient Egyptian monarch who was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, in the first half of the Old Kingdom period (26th century BC). Khufu succeeded his father Sneferu as king....Read More

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈʔaːdənaʊɐ] (listen); 5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was a German statesman who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a Christian...Read More

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (née Pierrepont; 15 May 1689 – 21 August 1762) was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet. Born in 1689, Lady Mary spent her early life in England. In 1712, Lady Mary married Edward Wortley Montagu, who later served as the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Lady...Read More

Lech Wałęsa (; Polish: [ˈlɛɣ vaˈwɛ̃sa] (listen); born 29 September 1943) is a Polish statesman, dissident, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as the President of Poland between 1990 and 1995. After winning the 1990 election, Wałęsa became the first democratically elected President...Read More

Ho-Am Byung-chull Lee (12 February 1910 – 19 November 1987) was a South Korean businessman. He was the founder of the Samsung Group, which is South Korea’s largest business group, and one of South Korea’s most successful businessmen. He was a pioneer of modern entrepreneurship and was a beacon of national economic development for South Korea.

Leif Erikson, Leiv Eiriksson or Leif Ericson also known as Leif the Lucky (old norse Leif inn Heppni) (c. 970 – c. 1020) was a Norse explorer from Iceland. He is thought to have been the first European to have set foot on continental North America (excluding Greenland), approximately half a...Read More

Fibonacci (; also US: , Italian: [fiboˈnattʃi]; c. 1170 – c. 1240–50), also known as Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, or Leonardo Bigollo Pisano (‘Leonardo the Traveller from Pisa’), was an Italian mathematician from the Republic of Pisa, considered to be “the most talented...Read More

Leonhard Euler ( OY-lər; German: [ˈɔʏlɐ] (listen); 15 April 1707 – 18 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in many other branches...Read More

Leonhart Fuchs (German: [ˈfʊks]; 17 January 1501 – 10 May 1566), sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs, was a German physician and botanist. His chief notability is as the author of a large book about plants and their uses as medicines, a herbal, which was first published in 1542 in Latin. It has about...Read More

Lewis Wickes Hine (September 26, 1874 – November 3, 1940) was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States.

Liliʻuokalani (Hawaiian pronunciation: [liˌliʔuokəˈlɐni]; Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha; September 2, 1838 – November 11, 1917) was the only queen regnant and the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, ruling from January 29, 1891, until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom...Read More

Wallace Hume Carothers (; April 27, 1896 – April 29, 1937) was an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont, who was credited with the invention of nylon.Carothers was a group leader at the DuPont Experimental Station laboratory, near Wilmington, Delaware, where most...Read More

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) was an American theologian and Baptist pastor who taught at the Rochester Theological Seminary. Rauschenbusch was a key figure in the Social Gospel and single tax movements that flourished in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was also the maternal grandfather of the influential philosopher Richard Rorty and the great-grandfather of Paul Raushenbush.

William Bateson (8 August 1861 – 8 February 1926) was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns. His 1894 book Materials for the Study of Variation was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics.

Ziad Ahmed is a 22-year-old senior at Yale University. He is an American-Muslim-Bangladeshi student, entrepreneur, and speaker.
He is the CEO/Founder of JUV Consulting which is a purpose-driven Generation Z marketing consultancy. He founded the company in 2016 in response to realizing the extent...Read More

Linus Carl Pauling (; February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest...Read More

Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed “Satchmo”, “Satch”, and “Pops”, was an American trumpeter and vocalist. He is among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and different eras in the history of jazz.Armstrong...Read More

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (; French: [dagɛʁ]; pronunciation; 18 November 1787 – 10 July 1851), better known as Louis Daguerre, was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter and a developer of the diorama theatre.

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (German pronunciation: [ˈluːtvɪg ˈbɔlt͡sman]; 20 February 1844 – 5 September 1906) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievements were the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics....Read More

Ludwig van Beethoven ( (listen), German: [ˈluːtvɪç fan ˈbeːtˌhoːfn̩] (listen); baptised 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of...Read More

Luis Fernando Cruz Ontiveros (born January 16, 1997 in Monterrey, Nuevo León) is a Mexican professional footballer.

Luther Burbank (March 7, 1849 – April 11, 1926) was an American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science.
He developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants over his 55-year career. Burbank’s varied creations included fruits, flowers, grains, grasses, and...Read More

Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908 – January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice president from 1961 to 1963 under President John F. Kennedy. A Democrat from Texas,...Read More

Maha Ghosananda (full title Samdech Preah Maha Ghosananda – Khmer: សម្តេចព្រះមហាឃោសានន្ទ; Pali: Mahāghosānanda; May 23, 1913 – March 12, 2007) was a highly revered Cambodian Buddhist monk in the Theravada tradition, who served as the Patriarch (Sangharaja)...Read More

Malala Yousafzai (Pashto pronunciation: Pashto: ملاله یوسفزۍ‎ [məˈlaːlə jusəf ˈzəj], Urdu: ملالہ یوسفزئی‎; born 12 July 1997), often referred to mononymously as Malala, is a Pakistani activist for female education and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She is also the...Read More

Marcello Malpighi (10 March 1628 – 29 November 1694) was an Italian biologist and physician, who is referred to as the “Founder of microscopical anatomy, histology & Father of physiology and embryology”. Malpighi’s name is borne by several physiological features related to...Read More

Marco Polo ( (listen), Venetian: [ˈmaɾko ˈpolo], Italian: [ˈmarko ˈpɔːlo] (listen); September 15, 1254 – January 8, 1324) was a Venetian merchant, explorer, and writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295. His travels are recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo...Read More

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Barnard College in New York City and her MA and PhD degrees from...Read More

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, (née Roberts; 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of...Read More

Maria Gaetana Agnesi (UK: an-YAY-zee, US: ahn-, Italian: [maˈriːa ɡaeˈtaːna aɲˈɲɛːzi, -ɲeːz-]; 16 May 1718 – 9 January 1799) was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed...Read More

Maria Mitchell (/məˈraɪə/; August 1, 1818 – June 28, 1889) was an American astronomer, librarian, naturalist, and educator. In 1847, she discovered a comet named 1847 VI (modern designation C/1847 T1) that was later known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” in her honor. She won a gold medal prize...Read More

Marita Cheng (born 5 March 1989) is the founder of Robogals. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year. She is the founder and current CEO of Aubot, a start-up robotics company. She co-founded Aipoly, an app to assist blind people to recognise objects using their mobile phones. She was named as one of the World’s Top 50 women in Technology by Forbes in 2018 and was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016.

Martha Graham (May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991) was an American modern dancer and choreographer. Her style, the Graham technique, reshaped American dance and is still taught worldwide.Graham danced and taught for over seventy years. She was the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel abroad...Read More

Martin Buber (Hebrew: מרטין בובר‎; German: Martin Buber; Yiddish: מארטין בובער‎; February 8, 1878 –
June 13, 1965) was an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between...Read More

Mary Baker Eddy (July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) was an American religious leader and author who founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, in New England in 1879. She also founded The Christian Science Monitor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning secular newspaper, in 1908 and three religious magazines: the...Read More

Mary Daly (October 16, 1928 – January 3, 2010) was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a “radical lesbian feminist”, taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy...Read More

Mary Douglas Leakey, FBA (née Nicol, 6 February 1913 – 9 December 1996) was a British paleoanthropologist who discovered the first fossilised Proconsul skull, an extinct ape which is now believed to be ancestral to humans. She also discovered the robust Zinjanthropus skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania,...Read More

Mary, Queen of Scots (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587), also known as Mary Stuart or Mary I of Scotland, was Queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication in 1567.
Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of King James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father...Read More

Maryam Mirzakhani (Persian: مریم میرزاخانی‎, pronounced [mæɾˈjæm miːɾzɑːxɑːˈniː]; 12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic...Read More

Muḥammad Ilyās ibn Muḥammad Ismā‘īl Kāndhlawī Dihlawī (1884 – 13 July 1944) was an Indian Islamic scholar who founded the Tablighi Jamaat Islamic revivalist movement, in 1925, in Mewat province.

Max Born (German: [ˈmaks ˈbɔɐ̯n]; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists...Read More

Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (French: [mak.si.mi.ljɛ̃ fʁɑ̃.swa ma.ʁi i.zi.dɔʁ də ʁɔ.bɛs.pjɛʁ]; 6 May 1758 – 28 July 1794) was a French lawyer and statesman who was one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Constituent...Read More

Maya Angelou ( (listen) AN-jə-loh; born Marguerite Annie Johnson; April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television...Read More

Mayer Amschel Rothschild (23 February 1744 – 19 September 1812; also spelled Anschel), was a German-Jewish banker and the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty. Referred to as a “founding father of international finance,” Rothschild was ranked seventh on the Forbes magazine list of “The Twenty Most Influential Businessmen of All Time” in 2005.

Meher Baba (born Merwan Sheriar Irani; 25 February 1894 – 31 January 1969), an Indian spiritual master, claimed to be the Avatar, or God in human form, of the age. A major spiritual figure of the 20th century, he had a following of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in India, but with a significant...Read More

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Italian: [mikeˈlandʒelo di lodoˈviːko ˌbwɔnarˈrɔːti siˈmoːni]; 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known simply as Michelangelo (English: ), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence,...Read More

Muhammad ibn Abdullah (Arabic: مُحَمَّد بنِ عَبْد ٱللَّٰه‎, romanized: Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh Classical Arabic pronunciation: [muˈħammad]; c. 570 CE – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of the world religion of Islam....Read More

Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (Persian: محمد بن موسی خوارزمی‎, romanized: Moḥammad ben Musā Khwārazmi; c. 780 – c. 850), or al-Khwarizmi and formerly Latinized as Algorithmi, was a Persian polymath who produced vastly influential works in mathematics, astronomy,...Read More

Moses (), also known as Moshe Rabbenu (Hebrew: מֹשֶׁה רַבֵּנוּ‎ lit. “Moshe our Teacher”), is considered the most important prophet in Judaism, and an important prophet in Christianity, Islam, the Baháʼí Faith, and a number of other Abrahamic religions. In the biblical...Read More

Mary G. Harris Jones (1837 (baptized) – 30 November 1930), known as Mother Jones from 1897 onwards, was an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist. She helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial...Read More

Mircea Eliade (Romanian: [ˈmirt͡ʃe̯a eliˈade]; March 13 [O.S. February 28] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in...Read More

Murasaki Shikibu (紫 式部, English: “Lady Murasaki”; c. 973 or 978 – c. 1014 or 1031) was a Japanese novelist, poet and lady-in-waiting at the Imperial court in the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji, widely considered to be one of the world’s...Read More

Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology,...Read More

Norman Joseph Woodland (September 6, 1921 – December 9, 2012) was an American inventor, best known as one of the inventors of the barcode, for which he received a patent in October 1952. Later, employed by IBM, he developed the format which became the ubiquitous Universal Product Code (UPC) of product labeling and check-out stands.

Sir Nicholas George Winton (born Wertheim; 19 May 1909 – 1 July 2015) was a British banker and humanitarian who established an organisation to rescue children at risk from Nazi Germany. Born to German-Jewish parents who had emigrated to Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, Winton supervised...Read More

Nicolas Appert (17 November 1749 – 1 June 1841) was the French inventor of airtight food preservation. Appert, known as the “father of canning”, was a confectioner. Appert described his invention as a way “of conserving all kinds of food substances in containers”.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French: [nisefɔʁ njɛps]; 7 March 1765 – 5 July 1833), commonly known or referred to simply as Nicéphore Niépce, was a French inventor, usually credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in that field. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to...Read More

Niels Henrik Abel ( AH-bəl, Norwegian: [ˈɑ̀ːbl̩]; 5 August 1802 – 6 April 1829) was a Norwegian mathematician who made pioneering contributions in a variety of fields. His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation...Read More

Nzingha Mbande (1583–1663) was Queen of the Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo (1624–1663) and Matamba (1631–1663), located in present-day northern Angola. Born into the ruling family of Ndongo, Nzinga received military and political training as a child, and she demonstrated an aptitude for defusing...Read More

Thích Nhất Hạnh (; Vietnamese: [tʰǐk̟ ɲə̌t hâjŋ̟ˀ] (listen); born as Nguyễn Xuân Bảo on October 11, 1926) is a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition, historically recognized as the main inspiration for engaged Buddhism.Nhất...Read More

Thomas Berry, CP, PhD (November 9, 1914 – June 1, 2009) was a cultural historian and scholar of the world’s religions, especially Asian traditions. Later as he studied Earth history and evolution, he called himself a “geologian.” He rejected the label “theologian” or “ecotheologian”...Read More

Om Prakash Gurjar is an Indian children’s rights activist and recipient of the 2006 International Children’s Peace Prize. He was born in Rajasthan, India and was a victim of illegal child labor. He is known for his fight to keep public schools in India free and advocating for birth certificate...Read More

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey; January 29, 1954) is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which was the highest-rated television program of its kind in...Read More

Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. (March 7, 1923 – October 25, 2018) was an American Catholic monk and priest of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (also known as Trappists). Keating was known as one of the principal developers of Centering Prayer, a contemporary method of contemplative prayer that emerged from St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts.

Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion. On May 26, 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name “Father Louis”. He was a member of the Abbey...Read More

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (March 10, 1957 – May 2, 2011), also transliterated as Usama bin Ladin, was a founder of the pan-Islamic militant organization al-Qaeda. The group is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...Read More

Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez (15 August 1917 – 24 March 1980) was a prelate of the Catholic Church in El Salvador. He served as auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of San Salvador, as bishop of Santiago de María, and finally as the fourth archbishop of San Salvador. As archbishop, Romero spoke...Read More

Oskar Schindler (German: [ˈɔs.kaʁ ˈʃɪnd.lɐ] (listen); 28 April 1908 – 9 October 1974) was a German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in occupied...Read More

Thomas Newcomen (; February 1664 – 5 August 1729) was an English inventor who created the atmospheric engine, the first practical fuel-burning engine in 1712. He was an ironmonger by trade and a Baptist lay preacher by calling.
He was born in Dartmouth, in Devon, England, to a merchant family...Read More

Karl Wilhelm Otto Lilienthal (23 May 1848 – 10 August 1896) was a German pioneer of aviation who became known as the “flying man”. He was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful flights with gliders. Newspapers and magazines published photographs of Lilienthal...Read More

Otto, Prince of Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg (German: Otto Fürst von Bismarck, Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Herzog zu Lauenburg pronounced [ˈɔtoː fɔn ˈbɪsmaʁk] (listen); 1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), born Junker Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, was a conservative...Read More

Phineas Taylor Barnum (; July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman, businessman, and politician, remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus (1871–2017) with James Anthony Bailey. He was also an author, publisher, and philanthropist, though...Read More

Paracelsus (; c. 1493 – 24 September 1541), born Theophrastus von Hohenheim (full name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), was a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance.He was a pioneer in several aspects of the “medical revolution”...Read More

Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran Protestant theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich taught at a number of universities in Germany...Read More

Pema Chödrön (པད་མ་ཆོས་སགྲོན padma chos sgron “lotus dharma lamp”; born Deirdre Blomfield-Brown, July 14, 1936) is an American Tibetan Buddhist. She is an ordained nun, former acharya of Shambhala Buddhism and disciple of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Chödrön has written several dozen books and audiobooks, and is principal teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia.

Anthony Francis Fernandes (born 30 April 1964) is a Malaysian entrepreneur. He is the founder of Tune Air Sdn. Bhd., who introduced the first budget no-frills airline, AirAsia, to Malaysians with the tagline “Now everyone can fly”. Fernandes managed to turn AirAsia, a failing government-linked...Read More

Pericles (; Attic Greek: Περικλῆς [pe.ri.klɛ̂ːs]; c. 495 – 429 BC) was a Greek statesman and general during the Golden Age of Athens. He was prominent and influential in Athenian politics, particularly between the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War, and was acclaimed by Thucydides,...Read More

Peter the Great (Russian: Пётр Вели́кий, tr. Pyotr Velíkiy, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr vʲɪˈlʲikʲɪj]), Peter I (Russian: Пётр Первый, tr. Pyotr Pyervyy, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ˈpʲɛrvɨj]) or Pyotr Alekséyevich (Russian: Пётр Алексе́евич, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ];...Read More

Pierre de Fermat (French: [pjɛːʁ də fɛʁma]; between 31 October and 6 December 1607 – 12 January 1665) was a French mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery...Read More

Pope John Paul II (Latin: Ioannes Paulus II; Italian: Giovanni Paolo II; Polish: Jan Paweł II; born Karol Józef Wojtyła [ˈkarɔl ˈjuzɛv vɔjˈtɨwa]; 18 May 1920 – 2 April 2005) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his death in 2005. He...Read More

Pope John XXIII (Latin: Ioannes; Italian: Giovanni; born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Italian pronunciation: [ˈandʒelo dʒuˈzɛppe roŋˈkalli]; 25 November 1881 – 3 June 1963) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 28 October 1958 until his death in 1963. Angelo...Read More

Pope Urban II (Latin: Urbanus II; c. 1035 – 29 July 1099), otherwise known as Odo of Châtillon or Otho de Lagery, was the head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 12 March 1088 to his death. He is best known for initiating the Crusades.Pope Urban was a native of France,...Read More

François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (French: [fʁɑ̃swa dɔminik tusɛ̃ luvɛʁtyʁ]; also known as Toussaint L’Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda; 1743 – 7 April 1803) was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution. During his life, Louverture first fought...Read More

Cai Lun (simplified Chinese: 蔡伦; traditional Chinese: 蔡倫; courtesy name: Jingzhong (敬仲); c. 50–62 – 121 CE), formerly romanized as Ts’ai Lun, was a Chinese eunuch court official of the Eastern Han dynasty. He is traditionally regarded as the inventor of paper and the modern...Read More

Tycho Brahe ( TY-koh BRAH(-hee) -⁠ BRAH-(h)ə; born Tyge Ottesen Brahe; 14 December 1546 – 24 October 1601) was a Danish astronomer, known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical observations. He was born in the then-Danish peninsula of Scania, which became part of Sweden the century afterwards....Read More

Vera Ellen Wang (Chinese: 王薇薇; pinyin: Wáng Wēiwēi; born June 27, 1949) is an American fashion designer.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from...Read More

Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, (Henry Charles Albert David; born 15 September 1984), is a member of the British royal family. As the younger son of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Wales, he is sixth in the line of succession to the British throne.
Born in St Mary’s Hospital,...Read More

Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; born 21 April 1926) is Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 other Commonwealth realms.Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Her father ascended the throne in 1936 upon...Read More

Elizabeth I (7 September 1533 – 24 March 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. Sometimes called the Virgin Queen, Gloriana or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the last of the five monarchs of the House of Tudor.Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII...Read More

Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert; April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019), also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and author. His widely known book, Be Here Now (1971), has been described as “seminal”, and helped popularize Eastern...Read More

Ramesses II (c. 1303–1213 BC) was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt. He is often regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom, itself the most powerful period of Ancient Egypt.The name Ramesses is pronounced variously . Other spellings...Read More

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) was an American Reformed theologian, ethicist, commentator on politics and public affairs, and professor at Union Theological Seminary for more than 30 years. Niebuhr was one of America’s leading public intellectuals for several decades of the 20th century...Read More

Richard Trevithick (13 April 1771 – 22 April 1833) was a British inventor and mining engineer from Cornwall, UK. The son of a mining captain, and born in the mining heartland of Cornwall, Trevithick was immersed in mining and engineering from an early age. He was an early pioneer of steam-powered...Read More

Robby Novak (born January 26, 2004) is an American media personality best known for portraying Kid President on YouTube and on television. He is featured in a series of YouTube videos and in a television show, produced by actor Rainn Wilson. Novak’s first YouTube clip as Kid President, written...Read More

Robert Boyle (; 25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific...Read More

Robert Brown (21 December 1773 – 10 June 1858) was a Scottish botanist and paleobotanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope. His contributions include one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the cell nucleus and cytoplasmic streaming;...Read More

Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (German: [ˈbʊnzən];
30 March 1811
– 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for...Read More

Major-General Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive (29 September 1725 – 22 November 1774), also known as Clive of India, was the first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency. He is credited along with Warren Hastings for laying the foundation of British rule in India. He began as a writer (the term...Read More

Robert W. Funk (July 18, 1926 – September 3, 2005) was an American biblical scholar, founder of the Jesus Seminar and the nonprofit Westar Institute in Santa Rosa, California. Funk sought to promote research and education on what he called biblical literacy. His approach to hermeneutics was historical-critical,...Read More

Robert Hutchings Goddard (October 5, 1882 – August 10, 1945) was an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. Goddard successfully launched his rocket on March 16, 1926, which ushered in an era of...Read More

Robert Holbrook Smith (August 8, 1879 – November 16, 1950), also known as Dr. Bob, was an American physician and surgeon who founded Alcoholics Anonymous with Bill Wilson (more commonly known as Bill W.).

Robert I (11 July 1274 – 7 June 1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce (Medieval Gaelic: Roibert a Briuis; Modern Scottish Gaelic: Raibeart Brus; Norman French: Robert de Brus or Robert de Bruys; Early Scots: Robert Brus; Latin: Robertus Brussius), was King of Scots from 1306 to his death in...Read More

Sir Robert Alexander Watson Watt, KCB, FRS, FRAeS (13 April 1892 – 5 December 1973) was a British pioneer of radio direction finding and radar technology.Watt began his career in radio physics with a job at the Met Office, where he began looking for accurate ways to track thunderstorms using the...Read More

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (July 19, 1921 – May 30, 2011) was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoassay technique. She was the second woman (after Gerty Cori), and the first American-born woman, to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius (German pronunciation: [ˈʁuːdɔlf ˈklaʊ̯zi̯ʊs]; 2 January 1822 – 24 August 1888) was a German physicist and mathematician and is considered one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot’s principle known...Read More

Sous-lieutenant Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (French: [kaʁno]; 1 June 1796 – 24 August 1832) was a French mechanical engineer in the French Army, military scientist and physicist, and often described as the “father of thermodynamics.” He published only one book, the Reflections on the...Read More

Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Kurdish: سەلاحەدینی ئەییووبی‎, romanized: Selahedînê Eyûbî; Arabic: الناصر صلاح الدين يوسف بن أيوب‎, romanized: an-Nāṣir Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb; 1137 – 4 March 1193), better known simply as...Read More

Abdul Rashid Salim Salman Khan (Hindi: [səlˈmɑːn xɑːn]; 27 December 1965) is an Indian actor, film producer, singer, painter and television personality who works in Hindi films. In a film career spanning over thirty years, Khan has received numerous awards, including two National Film Awards...Read More

Salvador B. Castro (October 25, 1933 – April 15, 2013) was a Mexican-American educator and activist. He was most well known for his role in the 1968 East Los Angeles high school walkouts, a series of protests against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schools. After...Read More

Samuel Colt (; July 19, 1814 – January 10, 1862) was an American inventor, industrialist, and businessman who established Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company (now Colt’s Manufacturing Company) and made the mass production of revolvers commercially viable.
Colt’s...Read More

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.

Seungsahn Haengwon (Korean: 숭산행원대선사; Hanja: 崇山行願大禪師; RR: Sungsan Haeng’weon Daeseonsa, August 1, 1927 – November 30, 2004), born Duk-In Lee, was a Korean Seon master of the Jogye Order and founder of the international Kwan Um School of Zen. He was the seventy-eighth...Read More

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (; Persian: سید حسین نصر‎, born April 7, 1933) is an Iranian philosopher and University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.
Born in Tehran, Nasr completed his education in Iran and the United States, earning a bachelor’s degree...Read More

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (; Persian: سید حسین نصر‎, born April 7, 1933) is an Iranian philosopher and University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.
Born in Tehran, Nasr completed his education in Iran and the United States, earning a bachelor’s degree...Read More

Shaka kaSenzangakhona (c. July 1787 – 22 September 1828), also known as Shaka Zulu (Zulu pronunciation: [ˈʃaːɠa]) and Sigidi kaSenzangakhona, was the founder of the Zulu Kingdom from 1816 to 1828. He was one of the most influential monarchs of the Zulu, responsible for re-organizing the military...Read More

Sai Baba of Shirdi (died 15 October 1918), also known as Shirdi Sai Baba, was an Indian spiritual master who is regarded by his devotees to be a manifestation of Sri Dattaguru and identified as a saint and a fakir. He was revered by both his Hindu and Muslim devotees during, as well as after his lifetime.Read More

Shunryu Suzuki (鈴木 俊隆 Suzuki Shunryū, dharma name Shōgaku Shunryū 祥岳俊隆, often called Suzuki Roshi; May 18, 1904 – December 4, 1971) was a Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States, and is renowned for founding the first Zen Buddhist monastery...Read More

Simone Adolphine Weil ( VAY, French: [simɔn vɛj] (listen); 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. The mathematician André Weil was her brother.After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout...Read More

Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Ponte Palacios y Blanco (24 July 1783 – 17 December 1830) (Spanish: [siˈmom boˈliβaɾ] (listen), English: BOL-iv-ər, -⁠ar also US: BOH-liv-ar), also colloquially as El Libertador, or Liberator of America was a Venezuelan military and...Read More

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British...Read More

Sir Francis Drake (c.  1540 – 28 January 1596) was an English explorer, sea captain, privateer, slave trader, naval officer, and politician. Drake is best known for his circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition, from 1577 to 1580. This included his incursion into the Pacific Ocean,...Read More

Sir Walter Raleigh, (; c. 1552 – 29 October 1618) also spelled Ralegh, was an English statesman, soldier, spy, writer, poet, explorer and landed gentleman. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion...Read More

Sonia Maria Sotomayor (Spanish: [ˈsonja sotomaˈʝoɾ]; born June 25, 1954) is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. She is the third woman to hold the position. Sotomayor is...Read More

Paul the Apostle (c. 5 – c. 64/67 AD), commonly known as Saint Paul and also known by his Hebrew name Saul of Tarsus, was a Christian apostle (although not one of the Twelve Apostles) who spread the teachings of Jesus in the first-century world. Generally regarded as one of the most important...Read More

Starhawk (born Miriam Simos on June 17, 1951) is an American feminist and author. She is known as a theorist of feminist Neopaganism and ecofeminism. She is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and for On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post online forum on religion. Her book The Spiral Dance (1979) was one of the main inspirations behind the Goddess movement.
In 2013, she was listed in Watkins’ Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.

Steven Paul Jobs (; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American business magnate, industrial designer, investor, and media proprietor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc.; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney...Read More

Sun Tzu ( soon DZOO, soon SOO; Chinese: 孫子; pinyin: Sūnzǐ) was a Chinese general, military strategist, writer, and philosopher who lived in the Eastern Zhou period of ancient China. Sun Tzu is traditionally credited as the author of The Art of War, an influential work of military strategy that...Read More

Svante August Arrhenius ( ə-REE-nee-əs, -⁠RAY-, Swedish: [ˈsvânːtɛ aˈrěːnɪɵs]; 19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received...Read More

Timur (Chagatay: تيمور Temür, lit. ‘Iron’; 9 April 1336 – 17–19 February 1405), later Timūr Gurkānī (Chagatay: تيمور کورگن Temür Küregen), was a Turco-Mongol conqueror who founded the Timurid Empire in and around modern-day Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia, becoming...Read More

Tank Man (also known as the Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 5, 1989, the day after the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on the Tiananmen protests. As the...Read More

Robert Edward Turner III (born November 19, 1938) is an American entrepreneur, television producer, media proprietor, and philanthropist. As a businessman, he is known as founder of the Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the...Read More

Mary Temple Grandin (born August 29, 1947) is an American scientist and animal behaviourist. She is a prominent proponent for the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter and the author of more than 60 scientific papers on animal behavior. Grandin is a consultant to the livestock industry, where...Read More

Charles Hall (1740–1825) was a British physician, social critic and Ricardian socialist who published The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States in 1805, condemning capitalism for its inability to provide for the poor. In the book, Hall argued that inequalities in wealth and the...Read More

Charles Martin Hall (December 6, 1863 – December 27, 1914) was an American inventor, businessman, and chemist. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an inexpensive method for producing aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron....Read More

Charles Martin Hall (December 6, 1863 – December 27, 1914) was an American inventor, businessman, and chemist. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an inexpensive method for producing aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron....Read More

Francis Harry Compton Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule. Crick and Watson’s paper in Nature in 1953 laid...Read More

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz ( AG-ə-see; French: [aɡasi]) FRS (For) FRSE (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist who is recognized as a scholar of Earth’s natural history.
Spending his early life in Switzerland, he received a doctor of philosophy...Read More

Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz (pseudonym, Actaea; Boston, December 5, 1822 – Arlington, June 27, 1907) was an American educator, naturalist, writer, and the co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. A researcher of natural history, she was an author and illustrator of natural history texts...Read More

Adolf Hitler (German: [ˈadɔlf ˈhɪtlɐ] (listen); 20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then assuming the title of Führer und...Read More

Betty M. James (February 13, 1918, Altoona, Pennsylvania – November 20, 2008, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), was an American businessperson who came up with the name for the Slinky her husband Richard T. James invented. She ran James Industries, the firm that manufactured the toy, by herself starting...Read More

Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami (IAST: Abhaya Caraṇāravinda Bhakti-vedānta Svāmī; 1 September 1896 – 14 November 1977) or Srila Prabhupada, born Abhay Charan De, was an Indian spiritual teacher and the founder-acharya (preceptor) of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness...Read More

Carrie Jane Everson (born Rebecca Jane Billings; 27 August 1842–3 November 1914) was an American who invented and patented processes for extracting valuable minerals from ore using froth floatation. The Mining Journal noted in 1916 that “as a metallurgist she was a quarter of a century in advance of her profession.”

Charles Martin Hall (December 6, 1863 – December 27, 1914) was an American inventor, businessman, and chemist. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an inexpensive method for producing aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron....Read More

Charles Martin Hall (December 6, 1863 – December 27, 1914) was an American inventor, businessman, and chemist. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an inexpensive method for producing aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron....Read More

Julia Brainerd Hall (November 11, 1859 – September 4, 1926) was the sister of American scientist Charles Martin Hall. She supported him in his discovery of the Hall process for extracting aluminium from its ore. She was also a still-life painter, who exhibited at the Edgar Adams Gallery in Cleveland.

Francis Harry Compton Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule. Crick and Watson’s paper in Nature in 1953 laid...Read More

Georgius Agricola (; born Georg Pawer or Georg Bauer; 24 March 1494 – 21 November 1555) was a German Humanist scholar, mineralogist and metallurgist. Born in the small town of Glauchau, in the Electorate of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire, he was broadly educated, but took a particular interest...Read More

Mao Zedong (December 26, 1893 – September 9, 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founding father of the People’s Republic of China, which he ruled as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 until...Read More

Jesus (c. 4 BC – AD 30 / 33), also referred to as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ, is the central figure of Christianity, the world’s largest religion. He was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. Most Christians believe he is the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited...Read More

Baháʼu’lláh (b. Ḥusayn-ʻAlí, 12 November 1817 – 29 May 1892) was a Persian religious leader, and the founder of the Baháʼí Faith, which advocates universal peace and unity among all races, nations, and religions.
Born into Persian nobility, at the age of 27 he accepted the...Read More

Linus Benedict Torvalds ( LEE-nəs TOR-vawldz, Finland Swedish: [ˈliːnʉs ˈtuːrvɑlds] (listen); born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and, historically, the main developer of the Linux kernel, used by Linux distributions and other operating systems...Read More

Jyotirao Govindrao Phule (11 April 1827 – 28 November 1890) was an Indian social activist, thinker, anti-caste social reformer and writer from Maharashtra. His work extended to many fields, including eradication of untouchability and the caste system and for his efforts in educating women and oppressed...Read More