My 10 Favourite People

A list of people whom I value for having made great contributions to science or culture, and/or have made great personal achievements, in no particular order.

1. Marie Curie

Via biography.com

Born in the scientifically-burgeoning world of the 1800’s, she was one of the first women to make a significant contribution to science. In the 1890’s, working with her husband to understand the recent discoveries of Henri Becquerel, she discovered radioactivity. Her discoveries paved the way for such inventions as the x-ray machine, Americium smoke-detectors, the nuclear reactor, countless medical advancements and even modern computers. She was so devoted to her work that she died from radiation poisoning after hanging around radiation sources practically every day. If not for her work, the world would be dimmer for lack of electricity.

2. Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger worked for his entire childhood learning complex maths; redefined the entirety of quantum physics. The prevailing ideas of quantum mechanics in his time were defined by a set of observations and explanations collectively called the Cöpenhagen Theory. By the time Schrödinger was done with it, the entire planet’s understanding of quantum mechanics was redefined forever; the entire Cöpenhagen theory effectively dismissed. Paving the way for countless future physicists, Schrödinger can essentially be credited with the invention of everything from smartphones to the microprocessors in coffee machines. Schrödinger even went head-to-head with Albert Einstein, Einstein charging Schrödinger’s views as “spooky”, even claiming the entirety of the quantum theory to be false. History proved Einstein so wrong that it’s genuinely overkill.

3. Yuri (Yuriy) Gagarin

Born in the Soviet Union in 1934, this impoverished farmer rose through the ranks of the military until finally volunteering for what was at that time essentially a suicide mission into outer space. After completing seventh-grade, Gagarin was selected for a prestigious industrial technical school. From there, Gagarin volunteered for flight school and learned to pilot planes. He became a Lieutenant of the Soviet Air Force in 1957. In 1960, he was chosen, along with 19 other applicants, to enter the space program. In 1961, Gagarin made the first manned spaceflight in history, winning countless awards later in life and garnering international fame. He died flying a state-of-the-art jet plane in the Soviet Union, an event which was mourned by the country and led to the “Yuri Gagarin Medal” becoming a national symbol of recognition.

4. Leonardo Da Vinci

OMG, where to start? This guy invented the very concept of the tank, sniper rifle, robot, helicopter, bicycle, pontoon bridge, camera, photovoltaics, the internal combustion engine and rotorcraft. He also made an animatronic lion that scared the shite out of the King of France. He pretty much invented the modern world 400 years early. He is especially badass to me for his constant evasion of authorities as a gay man in the 1500’s, a time at which the Catholic Church had a tight hold on all of Europe, and had declared sodomy a crime punishable by death. He was arrested at least once, but the charges never stuck and he was released. What’s more, he dissected corpses right under the Pope’s nose at a time when morticians didn’t exist and people experimenting on the dead as Da Vinci did were considered Satanists.

5. Ching Shih

She was the wife of a pirate who commanded a huge alliance of pirate ships in the South China Sea. He died, and Ching Shih was left in command. So, she expanded it so drastically that it became the largest pirate alliance in history, called the Red Flag Fleet. Her fleet was so powerful that she took on the entire Chinese navy...and won. 'nuff said.

6. Gottfried Leibniz

Around the time Newton was writing up rudimentary calculus to describe gravity, Leibniz was creating the rest of calculus without even knowing about Newton’s exploits. It’s Leibniz’s notation and equations we use today. When Newton found that Leibniz had also developed calculus, he was furious and went head-to-head with Leibniz in court. Newton hired a bunch of his friends and rigged the court proceedings in his favour. Leibniz lost the legal battle, but the facts were never lost to history.

7. Rosalind Franklin

Born in an era when women rarely received higher-education, she pioneered x-ray diffraction photography, discovered the structure of DNA, and become one of the most well-recognized names in science history. When working at King’s College, she took an x-ray diffraction photograph of strands of DNA labelled photo 51. This photograph, stolen by Watson and Crick, provided the perfect data for the two’s DNA double-helix model. Franklin’s name was purged from the records for a long time, and it wasn’t until after her premature death from working so closely with unshielded x-rays that she earned the name recognition she has today.

8. Sal Khan

Born in 1976, this former hedge fund analyst was from an early age determined to help others learn as much as possible at any cost. In 200, Khan began to tutor his cousin Nadia over the internet using Yahoo!’s Doodle notepad. He liked this teaching format, and he would go on to use it in a series of instructional videos on topics of maths and science. His science and mathematics videos became so popular and, in Sal’s opinion, helpful, that he quit his job in 2009 and started the non-profit Khan Academy, which grew into the largest free online education service in the world, bringing, as the slogan of the website says “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest educators since Socrates.

9. Stephen Hawking

Born in 1942, diagnosed with the death-sentence of ALS (a motor-neuron disorder) in graduate school, this physicist revolutionised our understanding of time and black holes with his work. The longest-living ALS diagnosee, Steven Hawking has made a name for himself as the writer of several books educating the public on matters of astrophysics and time. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on, among other things, spacetime singularities, becoming the first to propose a singularity in the centre of black holes and revolutionising the physics defined by the gap between Einsteinian Relativity and Schrödinger’s Quantum Theory. He later went on to create a model of how black holes evaporate utilising what he calls “Hawking Radiation”. Going even further, he invented the concept of lateral-complex time, or imaginary time. He made every one of these momentous advancements without the ability to walk or speak, relying instead on a computerised voice and mechanised wheelchair to move, write and speak.

10. Emma Goldman

An impoverished Jewish immigrant, this intellectual, with her ideas and ideals, defined a century of anarchist thought and political activism and dissent in North America, Europe, and Russia. In America, she spearheaded a major political movement in the early 20th century centred around the revolution; a derivation of the earlier ideas of Marx, but with a far heavier emphasis on the Libertarian. As a political dissident, she was targeted by government authorities and political activists alike, her countless pamphlets, speeches and books triggering outrage from the right, indifference from the less intellectually inclined, praise and applause from the proletariats of the day and suspicious surveillance from the government, she and her writings, especially her most famous collection of writings, My Disillusionment in Russia, defined the next hundred years of anarchist thought up until this very age, where her sentiments are alive and well in intellectual circles. Persecuted in her time, she was deported to Russia where she developed a deep hatred of its communist government. In the end, she lived out the later part of her life in Canada, never closing her mouth until her dying breath.