With the true millennium still 7 months away, I figured I would try to revive discussion, since I am not really ready to close down the list of notables. I will remind you that I am focused on positive contributions, and signal importance. I have tried to include people from different professions, and I have fudged by crediting more than one person on a single line when there is legitimate shared credit. This is the latest version of the list:
TENTATIVE TOP 100--- AND THEN SOME:
1. Winston Churchill
2. Ronald Reagan
3. Franklin Roosevelt
4. Margaret Thatcher
5. Harry Truman
6. George Marshall
7. Douglas MacArthur
8. Dwight Eisenhower
9. Chester Nimitz
10. George Orwell
11. Fred Hayek
12. Milton Friedman
13. John Paul II
14. Alexander Solzhenitsyn
15. Andrei Sakharov
16. George Bush
17. Helmut Kohl
18. Konrad Adenauer
19. Charles DeGaulle
20. Lech Walesa
21. Vaclav Havel
22. John XXIII
23. Martin Luther King
24. T.S. Eliot
25. D.H. Lawrence
26. James Joyce
27. G.B. Shaw
28. Albert Camus
29. Franz Kafka
30. Herman Hesse
31. Thomas Mann
32. Mikhail Gorbachev
33. John Maynard Keynes
34. Martin Heidegger
35. Karl Jaspers
36. Martin Buber
37. D.T. Suzuki
38. C.S. Lewis
39. Kemal Ataturk
40. Henry Ford
41. The Wright Brothers (in tandem)
42. Marconi/Tesla (acknowledging the dispute)
43. Vladimir Zworkin/Philo Farnsworth (both contributed crucially to television)
44. Alan Turing (computer)
45. George Stibitz (more or less the father of the computer)
46. Goddard/Von Braun
47. Marie and Pierre Curie (in tandem)
48. Albert Einstein
49. Niels Bohr
50. Werner Heisenberg
51. Gordon Moore/Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet)
52. Bardeen/Shockley/Brattain (the transistor)
53. Hoff/Mazor/Faggin (the microprocessor)
54. Paul Erlich (chemotherapy)
55. Alexander Fleming (penicillin)
56. Gerhard Domagk (sulfa drugs)
57. Salk/Sabin (polio vaccine)
58. Watson & Crick (DNA model)
59. William Halsted (surgery)
60. The Mayo Brothers (surgery)
61. Charles Lindbergh
62. Jane Addams
63. Theodore Roosevelt
64. Jorge Luis Borges
65. H. G. Wells
66. Isaac Asimov/Robert Heinlein
67. D.W. Griffith
68. Charles Chaplin
69. Frank Capra
70. John Ford
71. John Huston
72. Orson Welles
73. Jean Renoir
74. Federico Fellini
75. Ingmar Bergman
76. Akira Kurosawa
77. Walt Disney
78. Boris Yeltsin
79. Carl Jung
80. Duke Ellington
81. George & Ira Gershwin
82. Irving Berlin
83. The Beatles
84. Barry Gordy
85. Bob Dylan
86. Jesse Owens
87. Pablo Picasso
88. Henri Matisse
89. Piet Mondrian
90. Wassily Kandinsky
91. Constantin Brancusi
92. Marcel Duchamp
93. Jackson Pollack
94. Willem De Kooning
95. Frank Lloyd Wright
96. Louis Sullivan
97. Walter Gropius
98. Branch Rickey/Jackie Robinson
99. Mohandas Gandhi
100.Agnes DeMille/Martha Graham
I am happy to invite further comments, and, I hope, more discussion. When there have been some changes, I will change the heading to reflect them....... |
