Siddhartha Gautama
c. 5th century BCE
Left a palace to find out why people suffer. What he found is still being practised by several hundred million people.
Mind precedes all things; mind is their chief, they are mind-made.
Dhammapada, verse 1
World Imaging · Public domain
Albert Einstein
1879–1955
In 1905, a clerk at the patent office in Bern, he published four papers in one year: on light as quanta, on Brownian motion, on special relativity, and on E = mc².
Vienna, 1921 · Ferdinand Schmutzer
Ludwig van Beethoven
1770–1827
At thirty-one, going deaf, he wrote this letter to his brothers and never sent it. The Ninth Symphony came twenty-two years later.
It was only my art that held me back. It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.
Heiligenstadt Testament, 6 October 1802
Ludwig van Beethoven · Public domain
Marie Curie
1867–1934
Two Nobel Prizes, in two different sciences. She named polonium after a country that did not, at the time, exist on the map. Her notebooks are still radioactive.
Paris, c. 1920 · Henri Manuel
Harriet Tubman
c. 1822–1913
Escaped slavery in 1849, then went back into Maryland about thirteen times and led some seventy people out. She never lost one.
Powelson, Benjamin F. 1823 - 1885 · Public domain
Srinivasa Ramanujan
1887–1920
Largely self-taught in Kumbakonam. His notebooks hold thousands of results; some were proved only decades after he died at thirty-two.
Unknown authorUnknown author · CC BY 4.0
Florence Nightingale
1820–1910
Brought the death rate down in the Crimean hospitals by sanitation, then drew a diagram so that Parliament could see why.
Henry Hering (1814-1893) · Public domain
Rabindranath Tagore
1861–1941
Poet, composer, painter, founder of a school. Two countries sing anthems he wrote.
Georges Chevalier · CC BY 4.0
Katsushika Hokusai
1760–1849
Made the Great Wave at about seventy, and wrote that nothing he had drawn before the age of seventy was worth counting.
missing name · CC0
Ignaz Semmelweis
1818–1865
In one Vienna maternity clinic, maternal mortality fell from roughly 18% to around 2% after he required hand-washing. He was ridiculed for it, and died in an asylum.
József Borsos / Albert Doctor · Public domain
There wasn’t much resemblance.
Imhotep 27th century BCE
Probably designed the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the earliest large stone building known.
Confucius 551–479 BCE
A teacher whose students wrote down what he said. Two and a half thousand years of East Asian ethics followed.
Socrates c. 470–399 BCE
Wrote nothing. Asked questions in the marketplace until the city executed him.
Aristotle 384–322 BCE
Biology, logic, physics, ethics, poetics, politics. Much of it wrong, all of it the start of a subject.
Euclid fl. 300 BCE
Thirteen books of geometry, each step following from the last. A textbook for two thousand years.
Ashoka c. 304–232 BCE
An emperor who, after a war, had his regret carved on rocks and pillars across India.
Eratosthenes c. 276–194 BCE
Measured the circumference of the Earth with a well, a shadow and a stick, and came close.
Hypatia c. 350–415
Taught mathematics and philosophy in Alexandria. Killed by a mob.
Avicenna 980–1037
His Canon of Medicine was a standard medical textbook in Europe and the Islamic world for six hundred years.
Hildegard of Bingen 1098–1179
Composed music, wrote on medicine and botany, and invented a language, from a convent on the Rhine.
Fibonacci c. 1170–1250
Brought Hindu–Arabic numerals to Europe in 1202. Accountants have used them since.
Rumi 1207–1273
A Persian poet whose verses are still sung in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and beyond.
Ibn Battuta 1304–1369
Travelled roughly 120,000 kilometres over thirty years and dictated what he had seen.
Filippo Brunelleschi 1377–1446
Built the dome of Florence cathedral without scaffolding from the ground, and worked out linear perspective.
Some were recognized late.
Johannes Gutenberg c. 1400–1468
Movable metal type and a press. He died in debt.
Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519
Painter, anatomist, engineer. Filled thousands of notebook pages, most of them unpublished in his lifetime.
Nicolaus Copernicus 1473–1543
Put the Sun in the middle. Published the year he died.
Henry Dunant 1828–1910
Saw a battlefield at Solferino and founded the Red Cross. Went bankrupt; the first Nobel Peace Prize found him in a hospice.
Emily Dickinson 1830–1886
Nearly eighteen hundred poems, fewer than a dozen published while she lived.
Vincent van Gogh 1853–1890
About eight hundred and sixty paintings in ten years. He sold almost none of them.
Nikola Tesla 1856–1943
Alternating current, the induction motor, radio-controlled boats. Died in a hotel room, in debt.
Hilma af Klint 1862–1944
Painted abstractions before Kandinsky and asked that they not be shown for twenty years after her death.
Mary Anderson 1866–1953
Patented the windscreen wiper in 1903. Nobody bought it; the patent expired.
Scott Joplin c. 1868–1917
Ragtime. Died in an asylum; the Pulitzer came fifty-nine years later.
Franz Kafka 1883–1924
An insurance clerk who asked that his manuscripts be burned. His friend refused.
Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960
Novelist and anthropologist. Died in poverty; her grave was unmarked for thirteen years.
Sergei Korolev 1907–1966
Designed the first satellite and the first crewed flight after six years in the Gulag. His name was a state secret until he died.
Louise Bourgeois 1911–2010
Her first retrospective came at seventy-one. Spiders followed.
Ben Enwonwu 1917–1994
Nigerian sculptor and painter; his lost portrait Tutu was found in a London flat in 2018.
Toni Morrison 1931–2019
An editor who began writing novels at thirty-nine. The Nobel came at sixty-two.
Some were ignored.
Galileo Galilei 1564–1642
Pointed a telescope at Jupiter and saw moons. Spent his last years under house arrest.
Artemisia Gentileschi 1593–c. 1656
A painter in a century that did not admit women to the academies; the academies admitted her.
Sophie Germain 1776–1831
Studied mathematics under a man's name because women were not admitted; proved a case of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Mary Anning 1799–1847
Found the first complete plesiosaur on the Dorset coast, and was not admitted to the Geological Society.
Mary Seacole 1805–1881
Nursed soldiers in the Crimea at her own expense after the War Office turned her down.
Elizabeth Blackwell 1821–1910
The first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States, in 1849, after twenty-nine schools said no.
Gregor Mendel 1822–1884
A friar counting peas in a monastery garden. Genetics; ignored for thirty-five years.
Savitribai Phule 1831–1897
Opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848 and was pelted with dung on her way to teach.
Auguste Rodin 1840–1917
Rejected three times by the École des Beaux-Arts.
Berthe Morisot 1841–1895
Exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions. Her death certificate said: no profession.
Lise Meitner 1878–1968
Worked out nuclear fission with her nephew on a walk in the snow. The Nobel went to her colleague.
Emmy Noether 1882–1935
Her theorem links every symmetry in physics to a conserved quantity. She taught unpaid for years.
Igor Stravinsky 1882–1971
The Rite of Spring, 1913. The audience rioted.
Barbara McClintock 1902–1992
Found that genes move. She was not believed for thirty years.
Chien-Shiung Wu 1912–1997
Showed that nature tells left from right. The Nobel went to the two men who had suggested the experiment.
Maurice Hilleman 1919–2005
Developed more than forty vaccines, including measles, mumps and hepatitis B. Almost nobody knows his name.
Rosalind Franklin 1920–1958
Her photograph 51 showed the double helix.
Astor Piazzolla 1921–1992
Took the tango from the dance hall to the concert hall and was hated for it in Buenos Aires.
Paulo Freire 1921–1997
Taught sugar-cane workers to read using their own words, and was exiled for it.
Nina Simone 1933–2003
Trained for the concert hall, refused by the conservatory; sang the civil rights movement instead.
Zaha Hadid 1950–2016
Buildings that seemed impossible to build, for a decade unbuilt, then everywhere.
Some looked ordinary.
Miguel de Cervantes 1547–1616
Wrote Don Quixote after years as a soldier, a captive and a tax collector.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 1632–1723
A draper who ground his own lenses and was the first person to see bacteria.
Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750
Church music for a living. Over a thousand works; the Goldberg Variations were written to help someone sleep.
Michael Faraday 1791–1867
A bookbinder's apprentice who discovered electromagnetic induction. Every generator descends from it.
Josephine Cochrane 1839–1913
Invented the dishwasher because the servants kept chipping the china.
Anne Sullivan 1866–1936
Her teacher. Spelled the word water into a child's hand at a pump.
Wilbur Wright 1867–1912
With his brother, ran a bicycle shop and built the first aeroplane.
Charlie Chaplin 1889–1977
A London workhouse childhood, then the most recognised face on earth.
Shoji Hamada 1894–1978
A potter in Mashiko who refused to sign his pots. If they were good, he said, that was enough.
Chiune Sugihara 1900–1986
A Japanese consul in Lithuania who wrote transit visas by hand, against orders, for thousands of Jews.
Louis Armstrong 1901–1971
Learned the cornet in a home for delinquent boys in New Orleans.
Ella Baker 1903–1986
Organised for fifty years and refused to be the face of it. Strong people don't need strong leaders, she said.
Simone Weil 1909–1943
A philosopher who worked in a Renault factory to know what labour was.
Naguib Mahfouz 1911–2006
Cairo in thirty-four novels. A civil servant until sixty.
Saalumarada Thimmakka born c. 1911
Childless, she and her husband planted and watered hundreds of banyan trees along a road in Karnataka.
Fannie Lou Hamer 1917–1977
A sharecropper who registered to vote at forty-four, was beaten for it, and then registered others.
Vasili Arkhipov 1926–1998
In October 1962, aboard a submarine under depth charges, he refused to agree to fire a nuclear torpedo.
Abdul Sattar Edhi 1928–2016
Ran the largest volunteer ambulance service in the world from Karachi, and owned two sets of clothes.
Dashrath Manjhi 1934–2007
Carved a road through a hill in Bihar with a hammer and chisel. It took twenty-two years.
Jane Goodall born 1934
Went to Gombe in 1960 with no degree and a notebook, and watched chimpanzees for sixty years.
Valentina Tereshkova born 1937
A textile worker who flew forty-eight orbits alone in 1963.
Ali Farka Touré 1939–2006
A farmer from Niafunké who showed where the blues came from.
Stanislav Petrov 1939–2017
On 26 September 1983 the screens said five missiles were coming. He decided it was a false alarm.
Chico Mendes 1944–1988
A rubber tapper who organised to protect the Amazon and was killed for it.
Octavia E. Butler 1947–2006
Science fiction written at dawn before shifts as a dishwasher and a telemarketer.
Jadav Payeng born 1963
Planted a tree a day on a sandbar in Assam from 1979. It is now a forest larger than Central Park.
Some were doing the thing before anyone had language for it.
Hippocrates c. 460–370 BCE
Separated medicine from magic: illness had natural causes, and could be observed.
Archimedes c. 287–212 BCE
Levers, buoyancy, the volume of a sphere, and a method very close to calculus, in Syracuse.
Zhang Heng 78–139
Built a seismoscope that indicated the direction of a distant earthquake, in the year 132.
Aryabhata 476–550
Gave π to four decimal places and proposed the Earth turns on its axis.
Brahmagupta 598–668
Set out rules for zero and for negative numbers in 628.
Ibn al-Haytham c. 965–1040
Showed that we see because light enters the eye, and tested it. Optics began there.
Bi Sheng c. 970–1051
Invented movable type in clay, four hundred years before Gutenberg.
Murasaki Shikibu c. 973–1014
Wrote The Tale of Genji at the Heian court, around the year 1000. Arguably the first novel.
Shen Kuo 1031–1095
Described the magnetic compass needle, fossils, and movable type in one book of essays.
Al-Jazari 1136–1206
Built water-raising machines, a crankshaft, and programmable automata, and drew every part.
Maria Sibylla Merian 1647–1717
Sailed to Suriname at fifty-two to draw insects, and showed that caterpillars become butterflies.
Edward Jenner 1749–1823
Vaccinated a boy with cowpox in 1796. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980.
Charles Babbage 1791–1871
Designed a programmable computer in the 1830s. It was never built in his lifetime.
John Snow 1813–1858
Mapped cholera deaths in Soho in 1854 and had the handle removed from one pump.
Ada Lovelace 1815–1852
Wrote the first published algorithm for a machine that did not yet exist, in 1843.
Maria Montessori 1870–1952
Watched children in a Rome slum and rebuilt the classroom around what she saw.
Grace Hopper 1906–1992
Wrote the first compiler. Insisted that programs could be written in something like English.
Rachel Carson 1907–1964
Silent Spring, 1962. The environmental movement has a starting date.
Alan Turing 1912–1954
Defined computation in 1936, broke Enigma, asked whether machines can think. Prosecuted for being gay.
Hedy Lamarr 1914–2000
A film star who co-invented frequency hopping in 1941. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth descend from it.
Claude Shannon 1916–2001
Defined information in 1948. Every file size is measured in his units.
Radia Perlman born 1951
Invented the spanning-tree protocol that lets networks route around themselves.
The rest do not sort.
Sejong the Great 1397–1450
Had an alphabet designed so that ordinary Koreans could learn to read in days.
Michelangelo 1475–1564
The David at twenty-six. The Sistine ceiling by thirty-seven. Still working at eighty-eight.
Mimar Sinan c. 1490–1588
Chief architect of the Ottoman Empire for fifty years; hundreds of buildings, including the Selimiye Mosque at eighty.
Andreas Vesalius 1514–1564
Dissected human bodies himself and corrected a thousand years of anatomy.
Sen no Rikyū 1522–1591
Turned the tea ceremony into a discipline of simplicity. Ordered to kill himself by his patron.
William Shakespeare 1564–1616
Thirty-odd plays; the English language has not recovered.
Johannes Kepler 1571–1630
Worked out that planets move in ellipses, from another man's measurements.
Johannes Vermeer 1632–1675
About thirty-five paintings survive. Light on a wall in Delft.
Isaac Newton 1643–1727
Gravity, motion, optics, calculus. He said he had seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Antonio Stradivari 1644–1737
Around a thousand instruments in Cremona; about six hundred survive, and nobody has quite matched them.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 1648–1695
A nun in Mexico City who wrote poetry, plays and philosophy and defended a woman's right to study.
Leonhard Euler 1707–1783
Wrote more mathematics than anyone before or since, much of it after going blind.
Toussaint Louverture 1743–1803
Led the only slave revolt in history to found a nation.
Olaudah Equiano c. 1745–1797
Kidnapped as a child in what is now Nigeria; bought his freedom and wrote a book that helped end the British slave trade.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756–1791
Six hundred works by thirty-five.
Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777–1855
Corrected his father's payroll arithmetic at three, so the story goes; the rest of mathematics followed.
Charles Darwin 1809–1882
Twenty years of notes before he published. Natural selection.
Frederick Douglass c. 1818–1895
Taught himself to read as an enslaved child; became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.
Clara Schumann 1819–1896
One of the great pianists of her century, from the age of eleven, while raising eight children.
Joseph Bazalgette 1819–1891
Built London's sewers, and made them twice as big as needed. They are still in use.
Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881
Sentenced to death, reprieved at the last minute, sent to Siberia. Then the novels.
Louis Pasteur 1822–1895
Germs cause disease. Vaccines for anthrax and rabies. The milk is named after him.
Joseph Lister 1827–1912
Antiseptic surgery. Patients began surviving operations.
Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and a school for peasant children on his own estate.
You knew fewer of these names.
James Clerk Maxwell 1831–1879
Four equations: light is an electromagnetic wave.
Dmitri Mendeleev 1834–1907
Arranged the elements in a table with gaps, and predicted what would fill them.
Paul Cézanne 1839–1906
Painted the same mountain again and again until painting itself changed.
Claude Monet 1840–1926
Painted water lilies for the last thirty years of his life, going blind.
Emily Warren Roebling 1843–1903
When her husband fell ill, she oversaw the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Wilhelm Röntgen 1845–1923
Found X-rays in 1895 and refused to patent them.
Antoni Gaudí 1852–1926
Began the Sagrada Família in 1883. It is still being built.
Booker T. Washington 1856–1915
Born into slavery; built Tuskegee from a shack into a university.
Jane Addams 1860–1935
Opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889 and lived there among the people it served.
Fridtjof Nansen 1861–1930
Polar explorer, then the man who found homes for hundreds of thousands of refugees after the First World War.
Ida B. Wells 1862–1931
Documented lynchings in the United States, one by one, when no newspaper would.
George Washington Carver c. 1864–1943
Taught poor farmers in the South to restore their soil. Hundreds of uses for the peanut.
Käthe Kollwitz 1867–1945
Drew the poor, the grieving and the dead for fifty years. The Nazis removed her work from the museums.
Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
Over a thousand designs; Fallingwater over a waterfall; the Guggenheim at ninety-one.
Karl Landsteiner 1868–1943
Blood groups. Transfusions stopped killing people.
Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948
A lawyer who worked out how to resist an empire without a weapon.
Rosa Luxemburg 1871–1919
Economist, revolutionary. Murdered in Berlin and thrown into a canal.
The Hague, January 1873
Vincent van Gogh, age 19, a junior clerk at an art dealer's.
Mary McLeod Bethune 1875–1955
Started a school for Black girls with $1.50 and five pupils. It became a university.
Albert Schweitzer 1875–1965
Theologian, organist, then a doctor in Lambaréné for fifty years.
Constantin Brâncuși 1876–1957
Walked from Bucharest to Paris. Then reduced sculpture to its essence.
Willis Carrier 1876–1950
Air conditioning. Half the cities of the world are habitable in summer because of it.
Janusz Korczak 1878–1942
Ran an orphanage in Warsaw. Offered his freedom, he went with the children to Treblinka.
Helen Keller 1880–1968
Deaf and blind from nineteen months; the first such person to earn a degree.
Pablo Picasso 1881–1973
Fifty thousand works; he changed styles the way other people change shirts.
Alexander Fleming 1881–1955
Noticed a mould killing bacteria on a dish he had forgotten to clean.
Virginia Woolf 1882–1941
Rebuilt the novel from the inside of a mind.
Warsaw, 1883
Maria Skłodowska, age 16.
Later known as Marie Curie.
Niels Bohr 1885–1962
The quantum atom; then, in 1943, a fishing boat to Sweden ahead of the Gestapo.
Diego Rivera 1886–1957
Murals the size of walls, for people who did not go to galleries.
Tarsila do Amaral 1886–1973
Painted Brazil in its own colours; modernism arrived in São Paulo through her.
Nikolai Vavilov 1887–1943
Collected seeds from five continents to feed the world; starved to death in a Soviet prison.
Nadia Boulanger 1887–1979
Taught composition to much of the twentieth century.
Anna Akhmatova 1889–1966
Memorised her poems and had friends memorise them, because writing them down was a death sentence.
Frederick Banting 1891–1941
Insulin, in 1921. He sold the patent for one dollar.
Wilder Penfield 1891–1976
Mapped the living human brain by asking awake patients what they felt.
Lili Boulanger 1893–1918
The first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition, at nineteen. Dead at twenty-four.
1894
Albert Einstein, age 15.
Janaki Ammal 1897–1984
A botanist who made Indian sugarcane sweeter and later fought to save the Silent Valley forest.
Dorothy Day 1897–1980
Houses of hospitality for the poor, a newspaper sold for a penny, for fifty years.
Umm Kulthum c. 1898–1975
On the first Thursday of every month the Arab world stopped to listen to her on the radio.
Jorge Luis Borges 1899–1986
Libraries, labyrinths, infinite books; a librarian who went blind.
Duke Ellington 1899–1974
Wrote more than a thousand compositions for the orchestra he kept together for fifty years.
Anni Albers 1899–1994
Weaving as art; the first textile artist given a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art.
Hassan Fathy 1900–1989
Built for the poor in Egypt with mud brick and the vaults their ancestors had used.
Witold Pilecki 1901–1948
Volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz to report on it from inside. Escaped. Executed by the communist government.
Langston Hughes 1901–1967
Poems in the rhythm of jazz, for and about ordinary Black life.
Lucie Rie 1902–1995
Fled Vienna in 1938 and made pots in a London mews for fifty years.
John von Neumann 1903–1957
Game theory, the computer architecture still in use, and the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
Barbara Hepworth 1903–1975
Carved stone in St Ives for forty years.
George Nakashima 1905–1990
Learned woodworking in an internment camp; furniture that follows the tree.
Dmitri Shostakovich 1906–1975
Fifteen symphonies under Stalin, several written expecting arrest.
Hannah Arendt 1906–1975
Escaped a camp in France; then thought harder about totalitarianism than anyone.
Frida Kahlo 1907–1954
Painted from a bed after a bus crash, mostly herself, because she was the subject she knew best.
Charles and Ray Eames 1907–1978 · 1912–1988
Chairs, films, exhibitions. The best for the most for the least.
Oscar Niemeyer 1907–2012
Designed Brasília and kept working past a hundred.
Remedios Varo 1908–1963
Fled two wars to Mexico and painted worlds of her own for ten years.
Virginia Apgar 1909–1974
A one-minute score for newborn babies, still used in every delivery room.
Irena Sendler 1910–2008
Smuggled some 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto and buried their names in jars under an apple tree.
Django Reinhardt 1910–1953
Lost the use of two fingers in a caravan fire and reinvented jazz guitar with the others.
Akira Kurosawa 1910–1998
Thirty films. Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru.
Raoul Wallenberg 1912–1947?
Issued protective passports in Budapest in 1944; tens of thousands survived. He disappeared into Soviet custody.
Amrita Sher-Gil 1913–1941
Painted village India as nobody had; dead at twenty-eight.
Rosa Parks 1913–2005
Kept her seat.
Gerard Sekoto 1913–1993
Painted township life in South Africa, then forty-six years of exile in Paris.
Jesse Owens 1913–1980
Four gold medals in Berlin in 1936, in front of Hitler.
Jonas Salk 1914–1995
Polio vaccine, 1955. Asked who owned the patent, he said: could you patent the sun?
Norman Borlaug 1914–2009
Bred wheat that resisted disease and doubled yields; credited with saving hundreds of millions from famine.
Lina Bo Bardi 1914–1992
A museum on stilts in São Paulo, a factory turned into a playground.
Tenzing Norgay 1914–1986
Stood on Everest in 1953, on his seventh attempt.
Billie Holiday 1915–1959
Sang Strange Fruit in 1939, when it could end a career.
Édith Piaf 1915–1963
Sang on the streets of Paris as a child; four foot eight.
M. S. Subbulakshmi 1916–2004
The voice of Carnatic music for seventy years; she gave most of her earnings away.
Violeta Parra 1917–1967
Collected three thousand Chilean folk songs, then wrote Gracias a la vida.
Óscar Romero 1917–1980
An archbishop who spoke for the poor of El Salvador and was shot at the altar.
Katherine Johnson 1918–2020
Calculated the trajectories for the first American in orbit, by hand, when the computers were not trusted.
Nelson Mandela 1918–2013
Twenty-seven years in prison, then a country without a civil war.
Anna Mani 1918–2001
Built India's weather instruments and measured its ozone and its sunshine.
Ravi Shankar 1920–2012
Brought the sitar to concert halls on four continents.
Sophie Scholl 1921–1943
Distributed leaflets against Hitler at Munich university. Executed at twenty-one.
Satyajit Ray 1921–1992
Made Pather Panchali with borrowed money and an untrained crew.
Verghese Kurien 1921–2012
Organised dairy cooperatives; India went from importing milk to producing the most in the world.
Wisława Szymborska 1923–2012
About three hundred and fifty poems. Asked why so few: I have a wastebasket at home.
James Baldwin 1924–1987
Essays that told America what it was.
Celia Cruz 1925–2003
The Queen of Salsa, seventy albums, from Havana to exile and back to every stage.
John Coltrane 1926–1967
Practised so much that neighbours complained. A Love Supreme.
Cesar Chavez 1927–1993
Organised farm workers; a grape boycott followed by millions.
Gabriel García Márquez 1927–2014
One Hundred Years of Solitude, written while the family pawned the furniture.
Balkrishna Doshi 1927–2023
Housing for the poor in Indore, where residents could extend their own homes.
Agnès Varda 1928–2019
Films for sixty-five years, the last at ninety.
Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
Thirteen years of public life.
Ursula K. Le Guin 1929–2018
Invented worlds to ask how we might live.
Fazlur Rahman Khan 1929–1982
Invented the tube structure; tall buildings became possible and cheap.
Yayoi Kusama born 1929
Has lived by choice in a psychiatric hospital since 1977 and walks to her studio every day.
Chinua Achebe 1930–2013
Things Fall Apart, 1958. African literature in English was given a voice from inside.
Tu Youyou born 1930
Found artemisinin in a fourth-century text and tested it on herself. Millions of malaria deaths averted.
Jaime Escalante 1930–2010
Taught calculus in East Los Angeles to students everyone else had given up on.
Miriam Makeba 1932–2008
Sang against apartheid and was exiled for thirty-one years.
Roberto Clemente 1934–1972
Died flying relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
Yuri Gagarin 1934–1968
One orbit, 12 April 1961. One hundred and eight minutes.
Mercedes Sosa 1935–2009
Banned and exiled by the Argentine junta; the voice of Latin America.
Arvo Pärt born 1935
Fell silent for eight years, then returned with music of two or three notes at a time.
Margaret Hamilton born 1936
Led the software for the Apollo guidance computer. Her code caught the errors on the way to the Moon.
Fela Kuti 1938–1997
Invented Afrobeat and used it against a military government, which burned his house down.
Junko Tabei 1939–2016
The first woman on Everest, in 1975, after an avalanche buried her camp.
Wangari Maathai 1940–2011
Paid Kenyan women to plant trees. Some fifty million trees.
Wilma Rudolph 1940–1994
Polio as a child; three gold medals in Rome at twenty.
Mahmoud Darwish 1941–2008
Palestine's poet; thirty books, read across the Arab world.
Dennis Ritchie 1941–2011
The C language and, with Ken Thompson, Unix. Most of the internet runs on their descendants.
Hayao Miyazaki born 1941
Drew films by hand about children, wind and machines, for sixty years.
Muhammad Ali 1942–2016
Refused to be drafted and lost three years at his peak.
El Anatsui born 1944
Sculptures the size of buildings, made from thousands of bottle caps.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan 1948–1997
Qawwali, sung for hours at a stretch, heard far outside the shrines it came from.
Tim Berners-Lee born 1955
Wrote the World Wide Web in 1990 and gave it away.
Rigoberta Menchú born 1959
Told the story of the Maya in Guatemala's war and was heard around the world.
Maryam Mirzakhani 1977–2017
The first woman to win the Fields Medal. Died at forty.
Nobody knows yet.
Someone in here may change something.
Nobody knows who yet.
