#8 Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur (deceased 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist who is most famous for his work in microbiology and support of the germ theory of disease (the theory that microorganisms were the cause of disease, which was controversial until validated in the late 1800s). His contributions led to breakthroughs in disease prevention, including a reduction in the mortality rate of puerperal fever (The doctor’s plague). Pasteur is also known for discovering the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax and, most notably, for inventing a method of preventing milk and wine from spoiling and causing sickness, which was termed “pasteurization.”
#7 Karl Marx
Karl Marx (deceased 1883) was a German historian, sociologist, revolutionary and economist and was famous for his collection of ideas on the struggle between those who control the means of production and those who produce the labor, which became known as Marxism. Marx was heavily critical of capitalism, calling it “the dictatorship of bourgeoisie” and his concepts on society helped lead to the creation of future communist states, including the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Marx’s most well-known work was The Communist Manifesto, the most renowned work of the socialist movement.
# 6 Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (deceased 2006) was an economist, statistician, professor, and author who was famous for his studies of consumption, the money supply, and stabilization policy. A highly influential economic figure, economic advisor to president Ronald Reagan and 30 year intellectual leader at the University of Chicago, The Economist called Friedman “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century.” Friedman is also famous for his quote, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
#5 George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver (deceased 1943) was born into slavery, later freed by the Abolition Movement, American and was a scientist, botanist, inventor and educator who taught at Tuskegee University in Alabama, and was famous for inventing uses (including cosmetics, paints, plastics, gasoline and nitroglycerin) from peanuts, among other common crops. Carver’s work revolved around improving the life of the poor in the South by helping them grow various crops to help improve their quality of life and nutrition.
#4 Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood is an actor, producer, director, composer and politician most famous for his embodiment of a rugged, “no-nonsense” masculine character and for playing cowboy roles in “spaghetti western” movies such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood has won four oscars and remained a prominent figure in the film industry since entering the scene in the 1960s.
#3 Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite (deceased 2009) was an American broadcast journalist who was famous for being “the most trusted man in America” as the objective anchor for CBS News and for his sign off tagline, “and that’s the way it is.” Cronkite reported on topics including on location during World War II and the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Watergate scandal the assassination of president John F. Kennedy and the Beatles.
# 2 Robert Frost
Robert Frost (deceased 1963) was an America poet known for writing about rural, New England life and speaking through poems on social and philosophical themes. Curiously, Frost attended Dartmouth and Harvard, never earning a formal degree, held many was at one time a cobbler, teacher, and editor of a newspaper, and won four Pulitzer prizes.
#1 Paul Graham
Paul Graham is a venture capitalist, essayist and programmer who is known for founding Y Combinator (a venture capital firm), Viaweb (which was bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Store), Hacker News (a site about hacker and startup news) and whose work helped create the programming language family LISP (which has influenced javascript, Perl, Ruby and Python).
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