I recognized most of the scientists and not the celebrity, but I’m not sure how relevant that is. I mean, I knew who Neil DeGrasse Tyson was for years before I even knew that he was black. Far more important is to know what all those people have done.
Hawking has made great contributions to black hole thermodyamics, including being the first person to realize he’d discovered thermal radiation from them.
Curie isolated two new radioactive elements, and laid a lot of the groundwork in the study of radioactivity in general.
Tesla did a lot of the engineering of electrical power distribution, but is unfortunately a lot better known for all of the idiocy he was behind.
Einstein brought Special Relativity to fruition, made key early advances in quantum mechanics, and single-handedly created the best theory of gravity we’ve ever seen.
Freud is mostly outdated nowadays, but he was the first to attempt to treat psychology seriously as a scientist, even if his efforts at that were inadequate.
Elion… OK, I’ll admit that I didn’t know her. Looking over Wiki, though, it looks like her primary advances were in treatment of AIDS, including development of AZT.
Thomas Paine was a revolutionary propagandist who swayed American public sentiment to independence, though I’m not sure why he’s the lone non-scientist in the group (maybe just because his picture had the right aspect ratio to fit there?).
Newton invented the second-most-useful form of calculus, derived the laws of motion and of gravity, and combined them to explain the motions of everything in the Solar System.
Sagan did a better job of popularizing cosmology and other science than anyone else in the past century.
And Darwin developed the model for how descent-with-variation and natural selection could account for all of the diversity of life.
