A potential list, as written by the pre-eminent authority on the subject...me. Much help on this list from Wikipedia. More than a few of these are late 19th-century figures whose impact was most profoundly felt in the 20th century. Due to my lack of understanding, it doesn't include any mention of early computer science innovators, which is obviously a massive component of twentieth century life. Also, being a Yank, this list is probably US-centric, but definitely western-centric. A fun topic to kick around anyways. Note: this list is generally unsorted. The easy ones are towards the top but that's about it. Coming up with the list was hard enough..someone else can sort it! Albert Einstein Adolf Hitler Mao Tsedung Neville Chamberlain Winston Churchill Benito Mussollini Lenin Trotsky Stalin Michael Gorbachev Ronald Reagan Ho Chi Minh Enrico Fermi Jonas Saulk Alexander Graham Bell Pele Pope John Paul II Fidel Castro Ayatolla Khomeni The Beatles (counts as four?) Jimmy Carter Woodrow Wilson Nelson Mandela Henry Ford Laurie Dickson Thomas Edison Sergei Eisenstein Pablo Picasso F.D. Roosevelt Gamel Abdel Nasser David Ben-Gurion Michael Jordan Hideki Tojo Georges Clemenceau David Lloyd George Kaiser Wilhelm II Rachael Carson Pierre Trudeau Mahatma Ghandi Martin Luther King Vaclev Havel Lech Walesa Kemel Attaturk Helmut Kohl John Keynes Milton Friedman Diego Rivera J.R.R. Tolkein George Orwell Jean-Paul Satre George Kennan Marie Curie Paul Ehrlich Douglas MacArthur Yasser Arafat Louis Armstrong Sigmund Freud Karl Jung Alexander Fleming James Watson Francis Crick Max Planck Walt Disney Wright Brothers Marcel Proust W.B. Yeats Margaret Thatcher Charles DeGaulle Francisco Franco Marshall Tito Saddam Hussein Menachem Begin Anwar Sadat Bill Gates Niels Bohr Betrand Russell Yuri Gagarin Harry Truman Henry Kissinger Georgy Zhukov Dwight Eisenhower Bertold Brecht Rosa Parks Sir Edmund Hillary Leni Riefenstahl Bob Marley Robert Mugabi Mackenzie King Emiliano Zapata Muhammed Ali Jesse Owens Bob Dylan Sergei Rachmaninoff Elvis Presley Akiro Kurosawa Stephen Jay Gould E.O. Wilson Jane Goodall Jimi Hendrix Arsene Wenger
Shockley, Bardeen, Brittain- invented the transistor but, more importantly, there's Robert Adler, who invented the TV remote control (only slightly tongue in cheek)
-- Jimmy Carter over Nixon or JFK. Nixon probably reshaped how Americans viewed politics and his Vietnam policy changed an entire generation. JFK was associated with various issues that were far more important than Carter. -- Akiro Kurosawa? No doubt he is a great movie director, but the most influencial person of the century? How about Charlie Chaplin instead? -- Hendrix, Dylan and Marley. I will replace some of them with Sinatra and/or Louis Armstrong. -- Rosa Parks is probably unknown outside the US. His contribution to the world is limited to the US. -- I would have added Che Guevara. Communism is finished, but he remains the symbol of revolution and/or champion of the poor. -- The Wright brothers.
Don't have time to research the name, but what about the guy who invented/discovered/stumbled upon plastic. IIRC plastic was somewhat of an accident. I think that originally it was the leftover "residue" of a reaction looking for something else. Hard to imagine a world without plastic today.
If Brecht and Sartre are on there (which I agree with), so should Ianesco and Beckett IMO. For that matter, Albee, Williams, and Miller could easily find their way on there as well. Others: Frank Lloyd Wright Virginia Wolff maybe Anne Frank and for me I'd include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, and Robert Heinlein as well, call it my geek contribution. ....and thats all i can think of for now. Good list.
Yeah, I see your point(s), yet I also highly revere his work in the Middle East and other internal (US) reforms. And his handling of the Iran hostage situation, good or bad, has probably had profound impacts on our world of today. Probably of equal influence. Chaplin should be on there, no doubt. In terms of world-wide impact, I'd select all three of those listed above Frank Sinatra. And I love Sinatra. Louis Armstrong is on there. Her contribution is a good point for debate. Without her, would we have MLK? The Civil Rights Act? Dixiecrat defection to the Republican party, which, of course, changes foreign policy for the world's superpower? Hmmm... I debated Che's inclusion for a long time. In the end I moved away from him mostly because his contribution is partly magnified by a cult of personality about the guy. You might say that people like Eva Peron and Pinochet were more influencial. On the list. And....wrightly so!
Yeah, I have to admit that the list leans heavily towards political personalities at the expense of cultural. I could see adding most any of these folks you mention if they are read worldwide at the expense of a more regional political person (i.e. Attaturk, Mugabe)
Deng Xiaoping was more influential than quite a few of the political leaders you mentioned, as was Sun Yat-Sen.
Since the purpose of such lists is to start debate . . . Tolkein, Proust, and Mugabe don't belong anywhere near that list. Proust is quite obviously important, but few people have actually read him, and even fewer have read more than Swann's Way.* Joyce is much more important. Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollocl/Clement Greenberg belong on this list. Yeats is an interesting choice, but I'd substitute Ezra Pound (and, by extension, Poetry magazine's editor during Pound's time on that journal, Harriet Monroe). His own poetry is important, even though it falls well below the heights attained by his peers, but he also guided Eliot to greatness, advised Yeats in such a way to make him better, discovered Robert Frost, and invented Imagism. It's not really hyperbole to suggest that Pound almost single-handedly created modernist literature (. . . before becoming an insane fascist traitor, that is). *When the Times Literary Supplement published their "most important books of the millenium" lists, several contributors listed Remembrence of Things Past. It was clear that said writers only did so to boast that they had read the entire work. What was more troubling were the qualities they attributed to the book--that it provided a stunning portrait of the aristocratic mailaise in France that led to France's deportation of the Jews in WWII. Perhaps, but this ignores the fact that Proust is thus complicit, as the Dreyfus affair is treated only as a subject for cocktail party banter.
I disagree. He was one of if not the main contributor to the longest and largest war since WW2. Just because he's African and therefore doesn't have much of an impact on life in the U.S. doesn't mean he isn't influential in other arena's. He was one of the most important and recognised revolutionary leaders in Africa and has changed the way Westerners think about Africa - (that is if you do at all I guess...... ) He was the first African leader to openly challenge the white population without fear in the modern world by re-claiming land and trying to bring equality for the black and coloured populations. Since that, similar events have happened, albeit on a smaller scale, in South Africa, Namibia and Kenya. He still has large influences over much of Southern Africa. To say that he wasn't influential in the 20th Century is ignorant of African history - and you may of realised that it's quite a big continant.......
I would put way more science/engineering types in there and way fewer politicians and artists. Certianly a worthy addition. Here is the story: In 1912 a German chemist named Fritz Klatte was looking for a better material to dope fabric airplane wings. He was working with acetylene, and in one experiment mixed it with hydrogen chloride and mercury and let it stand in sunlight. The mixture solidified. With German efficiency he pantented his formula, but thought it "not useful" and did no further work. The patent lapsed in 1924. The stuff he threw away was vinyl chloride. In the 1930s this became a subject of research, and soon polyvinyl chloride was developed - or as we know it today, PVC.
absolutely agree with this. especially the artists. Depending on how one defines influence. I really cannot imagine anyone's lives (except for relatives and a few academics) being different today had artist/author etc.. on the list never existed in the first place. If not Chaplin, then some other actor, Buster Keaton?, would have been handed that level of fame and influence. Without the specific scientist, the discovery may never have been made. other additions to the list would include Watson and Crick and Craig Venter, founder of Celera, without whom the human genome still would not be close to being sequenced.
Thought of Ezra Pound..but pulled back because of that old fascist bugaboo thing. Proust is considered the greatest novellist by other writers, of which I am certainly not one. If we were going to shoot for a more mass market appeal, Stephen King would be more appropriate. But I did try to split between critical and mass appeal...hence Tolkein's inclusion, which I stand behind. Like it or not, it set the stage for a wave of fantasy literature and film that was a unique component of twentieth century cultural life (at least in the west). And anyone that invents PVC certainly deserves inclusion. As should anyone that may have had breakthrough discoveries in the uses and refinement of aluminum. I just don't have any idea who that may be...thoughts? Watson and Crick are on the list. Debussy certainly should be on the list. Really wanted to put Buster Keaton on there..and probably should. And Rick has more than adequately defended my inclusion of Mugabe. And can someone fill me in on Sun Yat Sen? Might have added Neil Armstrong but I dunno....
19th, not 20th century. Which kind leads to a bigger problem. Lots of the science and engineering is done by people who are difficult or impossible to know. They are hidden in the coporate bureaucracy somewhere, or created a product that only experts in a certain field know how important it is. Since WWII, things have become too complicated to know who is really influencing our lives.
Maybe we should add some institutions that were really outstanding, like the old Bell Labs for example. Shockley, Bardeen, and Brittain were there when they invented the trtansistor. Or we could talk about folks like Claude Shannon who developed a mathematical theory of information (he invented the "bit" short for "binary digit"). The list goes on I STILL stand by Robert Adler. Seriously, can most of us imagine life without the remote control? How about Jobs and Woz - the first practical commercially successful combination of a GUI and mouse control making the desktop PC practical for millions of computer users. Is my EE showing?
Agree, topcat. That was the problem with finding a "person" who was instrumental in the development of the personal computer...it was a massive team with massive private and public support. Hard to say who that one person was? And I wanted to put Jobs in there but was filtering out my own preference/bias towards Macs! Seeing as how the whole windows interface is really a Mac interface, he should be in there for sure. And in retrospect, Robert Oppenheimer should definitely be in there. He lead a very complicated and diverse international team to develop a technology that put the fear of God into the entire human race!
If you want to reward the development of the windowed, mouse driven interface, then put the Xerox PARC group in the list (and for also developing laser printing, Ethernet and a host of other useful developments). The Xerox 8010 beat the Lisa to market by about 4 years. And the Mac interface was based on PARC's Alto computer.
Absolutely! BUT that's why I hedged and added "commercially successful"!! If Xerox had had the foresight to push some of those PARC inventions into the field one can only speculate how big they would have gotten.