A fine time indeed. Like so many things, my votes would change depending on I how I felt – or how the dice feel in some cases – but for the most part the SD list strikes me as more realistic than Hart’s. I remain confused that Hart was willing to rate Hitler and Stalin but not Churchill and FDR. Ah well. Each to list as he chooses.
Thanks.
I took the top 20 from the SDMB list and the top 20 from Hart’s list and merged them. Here they are in alphabetical order:
Albert Einstein physicist; relativity; Einsteinian physics
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier father of modern chemistry; philosopher; economist
Aristotle influential Greek philosopher
Augustus Caesar ruler
Buddha founder of Buddhism
Charles Darwin biologist; described Darwinian evolution
Christopher Columbus explorer; led Europe to Americas
Confucius founder of Confucianism
Euclid mathematician; Euclidian geometry
Galileo Galilei astronomer; accurately described heliocentric solar system
Genghis Khan SDMB 8
George Washington SDMB 6
Isaac Newton Physicst, Mathematician
James Watt SDMB 10
Jesus Christ founder of Christianity
Johann Gutenberg developed movable type; printed Bibles
Karl Marx SDMB 20
Lenin SDMB 17
Louis Pasteur scientist; pasteurization
Moses major prophet of Judaism
Mohammad Prophet of Islam; conqueror of Arabia
Nicolaus Copernicus astronomer; taught heliocentricity
Plato SDMB 11
Shih Huang Ti Chinese emperor
St Paul Judaism; Christianity
Sui Wen Ti, unified China, SDMB 13
Thomas Edison SDMB 15
Ts’ai Lun inventor of paper
Those compiling a personal top 10 list might choose from among these candidates.
My ten (ranked, hurredly):
Obviously I don’t think much of leaders. When I went through the rounds, I had three different criteria I used to make my selections:
The only two leaders which may have broken my top 10 would be Washington or Alexander the Great, for #3 and 2 respectively. My criteria show a bias towards scientists and inventors, but that’s who I am.
Aristotle, to me, holds all three criteria in spades. His ideas are world-changingly original for his time. As one of the “fathers” of the Greco-Roman branch of Western Civilization, tens of billions of people have been affected by Aristotle’s ideas (most of them without knowing it), and his rationalist-scientific approach to the natural world was a turning point for all mankind.
Gutenberg is a turning point. In 1455, Europe had maybe 10 million books, scrolls, etc, about 1/2 of all written material in the world. By 1600, Europe had over 150,000,000 printed books (88% of the worlds store of knowledge) and innumerable pamphlets, brochures, flyers, and bromides. Combine this explosion of knowledge in a civilization that appreciates the Greek rationalist approach (and is ready to add modifications of its own), and it’s no surprise that 200 years after the presses invention, Newton, the winner of the SDMB voting, appeared.
Newton defies the categories - his triumph is showing what one could achieve in this new scientific age, from explaining why things fall down to making better telescopes, Newton generates awe in the completeness of his ideas. He showed mankind that the world, all of it, was open to our understanding… and our use. And he did so in a civilization with tens of thousands of printing presses and tens of millions of literate citizens.
The exercise was harder than I thought, probably because I never worked out what “Influence” meant. (I see that JohnT has offered a pretty fair presentation though.) Partly, I used the counterfactual approach: I asked what would have happened if you took the individual out of history. But mostly I shuffled the goalposts around as necessary.
Here they are:
1 Mohammad
2 St Paul
Religious types deserve top ranking, if only because of their overwhelming share of the human mind-space. Mohammad beats Christianity because his genius was literary, religious and political. I judge St. Paul to be necessary for Christianity to take hold: Jesus of Nazareth was merely born into the role, as it were. Alternatively, I ascribe a substantial share of his teachings to those who came before and after him.
3 Johann Gutenberg
See above. The printshop is prerequisite for the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution. It was a precursor to the Industrial Revolution, an application of interchangeable parts and the American system of manufacture. Lose communication and you lose modernity.
4 Aristotle
The first methodical thinker. A precursor to empiricism. Unfortunately, his philosophical work pushed deduction.
5 Francis Bacon
The father of empiricism, the scientific method, the advocate of induction. Or anyway, this would be his ranking, if I could actually claim that. But Bacon was born in 1561, 100 years after Copernicus. His contemporary Galileo did fine without being overly influenced by him, to my knowledge. So consider this false entry to be a marker of sorts.
5 Confucius
6 Alexander
Confucius also possesses a lot of mindshare, as does Tao. Alexander wins the conqueror contest because he pushed Greek ideas deep into the Asian continent while the most successful invader (Genghis Khan) didn’t have a comparable cultural influence. Nor did Caesar, I would argue.
7 Jesus Christ
8 Nicolaus Copernicus
Well I had to put the Man from Nazareth somewhere! Copernicus was the first scientist to base a major counter-intuitive result from empirical observation, thus permitting the idea of science.
9 Isaac Newton
10 Buddha
11 Shakespeare?
12 Darwin?
Newton loses to Copernicus because the idea of Science was firmly established by the time he was born. But Newton showed the possibilities of successful science, as well as being an intellectual champion of the highest order.
The Buddha secures this ranking because he is a) a religious figure who b) influenced Hinduism. Buddhism itself is a once major religion that is now a noteworthy religion.
That was my first cut anyway. Debate is welcome!
Regarding Copernicus and Kepler:
Earlier I rated Kepler as very influential and Copernicus much less so, but have changed my mind and now agree more with Hart and Measure for Measure (though not enough to put Copernicus in the Top Ten).
Kepler’s work and discovery were very brilliant, but perhaps inconsequential! His Laws would have been, for Newton, trivial corollaries of Newton’s more general laws.
I think I demoted Copernicus believing claims that Indian and Islamic astronomers had developed heliocentricism earlier but those claims are mostly seen on the Internet only at … Indian and Islamic sites! It appears true that Copernicus borrowed heavily from Islamic mathematicians, but that may not diminish his influence.
One can Google for other lists of most influential scientists or influential people in general. Most of those lists (unjustly?) rate Kepler much higher than Copernicus. Niels Bohr ranks as very influential on other lists; Hart placed him down at #100 in his first edition, then removed him altogether. Dopers ranked Einstein and Planck as the most influential post-Maxwell scientists; this seems very reasonable to me; is it?
One point to note about Hart’s criterion is that he considers future influence. Einstein had no influence whatsoever before the 20th century so might be ranked low, but Hart considers his 21st, 22nd, 23rd century influence, etc.
My Top Eight are all drawn from Measure for Measure’s Top Ten (ignoring his duplicated-5 Bacon :dubious: ). The two of his I want to reject are:
I put Qin Shi Huang and Augustus Caesar at the top of my leaders list. Since Persia and Egypt were probably due to be Hellenized anyway, and China never was, by “deep into the Asian continent” I think you mean specifically India. I don’t see that development as so consequential.
Agreeing on Newton and Aristotle as the two most influential scientists, I have trouble picking a #3, but Galileo, Pasteur and Einstein would be those who round out my Top Five scientists. And it’s tempting to accept Hart’s choice of Ts’ai Lun. We don’t know he was essential to the invention of paper, but then, isn’t Gutenberg’s own uniqueness also unclear?
Thus my Top Eight are Mohammed, St. Paul, Newton, Aristotle, Confucius, Jesus, Gutenberg, Buddha. If forced to make this Ten, I guess I’d add Einstein and Pasteur.
I’d add to the list
Nikola Tesla - For alternating current and the radio among other things
Norman Borlaug - Groundbreaking research in agriculture to develop higher yield and disease resistant grains. Also known as the father of the green revolution
Alain Turing - For his work in computer science, formalisation of the algorithm, and breaking the enigma code in WWII. Without Turing the World War might have ended very differently for the british and Europe.
Someone should definitely get on the list for the invention of the transistor, but I’m not sure who. There were many people involved.
As for the leaders, I think Alexander is somewhat overrated historically, though still very important. Sure he was a supreme conqueror, but his reign was very short lived, and his empire didn’t outlive him. The romans idolized him as a perfect leader, and that’s partly to blame for Alexander’s legendary status. Alexander’s most significant contribution was spreading greek culture to the east. Without that he would be just another conqueror, and history has plenty of those.
The Roman Empire on the other hand is very influential in the history of European Civilization, and European countries have had a huge impact on the entire world since the 1500s.
Many of the languages, modes of government, justice systems and cultures of Europe bear the legacy of the Roman Empire. Roman roads were still an important mode of travel for a long time after the Empire had collapsed, and a large part of the world still uses the latin alphabet. Augustus is important because unlike Alexander, he acted to build a lasting Empire. That’s not to say the Roman Empire was necessarily good, as it involved many terrible things, but influence isn’t a moral judgment.
Thanks again for organizing this! It was great fun, and made me re-evaluate my opinion on several historical people.
Help fight my ignorance regarding Caesar. In 218BC, the Roman Empire was roughly modern day Italy. By 100 BC it covered parts of Spain, southern France, Tunisia in North Africa, and parts of Yugoslavia, Turkey and Iraq. Caesar conquered most of Spain, Portugal, France and more of North Africa. Afterwards Rome kept expanding.
I had thought of Caesar as just another successful Roman Emperor. Wasn’t Rome’s expansion in some way inevitable? Is Caesar a place-holder for the Roman Empire or did he play a more individual role? Wikipedia notes that he played a critical role in transforming the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Ookay, but it seems to me that Rome was plenty expansionary both before and after his rule.
sohvan and septimus: Nice contrast of the Greek and Roman empires. Looks like we might want to downgrade poor Alexander.
Fresh brains!
Anyway, I’m moving next week and while yanking books out of the bookcase what do I see but my copy of Life Magazine’s “The 100 Most Important Events and People of the Past 1,000 Years” (which was published in 1999). While the timeline scope is more limited than that in this game, I thought it might be of interest to participants of this thread…
People first:
Interesting that the discoverers ranked much more highly than we at the SDMB placed them… in my opinion, they’re ranked WAY too high on the Life list. Edison is a very surprising #1, and the absence of Watt (and Adam Smith) is quite bizarre.
Unfortunately, I clicked “Post Message” before I could give you Life’s reasoning, which you will find in the next post…
Here is Life’s reasoning behind the 100 people list…
Here is Life Magazines top-100 Events of the last Millennium:
Guys and gals, it’s been over a decade since I ran this game and am wondering if there is an interest in doing a new one, this time with an updated list (say, we lop off the bottom 25 of our 2010 list and add other, more worthy people)?