100 Most Influencial People of the 20th Century

[KevTheGooner]

A potential list, as written by the pre-eminent authority on the subject...me. :D 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 :D

[Pints]

I would add Frederick Banting. Who discovered the use of Insulin to manage Diabetes in 1921-22.

[Pints]

Oh, and how could you miss Albert Hoffman? What he did in 1943 changed ALOT of people.

[KevTheGooner]

Oh, and how could you miss Albert Hoffman? What he did in 1943 changed ALOT of people.


Trippy answer dude. ;)

[Saudi64]

You should add King Abdulaziz, without him their would be no Saudi Arabia. :D

[topcatcole]

Shockley, Bardeen, Brittain- invented the transistor

but, more importantly, there's Robert Adler, who invented the TV remote control

(only slightly tongue in cheek)

[Excape Goat]

-- 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.

[dna77054]

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.

[art]

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.

[KevTheGooner]

-- 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.

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.

-- Akiro Kurosawa? No doubt he is a great movie director, but the most influencial person of the century? How about Charlie Chaplin instead?

Probably of equal influence. Chaplin should be on there, no doubt.

-- Hendrix, Dylan and Marley. I will replace some of them with Sinatra and/or Louis Armstrong.

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.

-- Rosa Parks is probably unknown outside the US. His contribution to the world is limited to the US.

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 would have added Che Guevara. Communism is finished, but he remains the symbol of revolution and/or champion of the poor.

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.

-- The Wright brothers.

On the list. And....wrightly so! :)

[KevTheGooner]

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 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)

[minorthreat]

Deng Xiaoping was more influential than quite a few of the political leaders you mentioned, as was Sun Yat-Sen.

[bojendyk]

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.

[nowayjose]

A potential list, as written by the pre-eminent authority on the subject...me. :D 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 :D


Where is Forest Gump? Where is Gordon Gekko? Where is Mickey Mouse?

[christopher d]

Claude Debussy
Maurice Ravel
John Cage
Robert Johnson
Arnold Schoenberg
Charles Ives

[Rick B]

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.*



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.......

[spejic]

I would put way more science/engineering types in there and way fewer politicians and artists.

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.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.

[dna77054]

I would put way more science/engineering types in there and way fewer politicians and artists.


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.

[KevTheGooner]

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....

[spejic]

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?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.