William Dampier (1651-1715), about whom I’m reading at present. The man circumnavigated the globe three times, and the information he gathered and produced about ocean currents and winds was used into the 20th century. His work was used by explorers like Cook and Darwin, and likely saved hundreds of lives being lost by shipwreck.
I must admit that this always that this always strikes me as the slightly weird one when people suggest it as a pinnacle. Yes, two geniuses had much the same idea - independently, despite what Newton claimed - at much the same time. That, however, seems fairly good evidence that the idea was “in the air”. Which, for all the brilliance of the idea, seems sort of obviously true. Calculus did have a long prehistory of people almost getting there.
Yet this somehow propels Newton into a prime candidate for the “greatest mathematician” (and hence, because he’s also a candidate for “greatest physicist” in a way that Leibnitz, possibly unfairly, doesn’t rank in) and hence often “greatest scientist”, he tends to handily outrank Leibnitz in such comparisons. All a bit arbitrarily.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
Tempted as I am to support the physicist, I think I just might place Mendel’s genetics above Einstein’s general relativity. Mendel is, so far as I know, unique among scientists in that he did not stand on the shoulders of giants. Mendelian genetics could have been discovered at any time after the development of agriculture back in the murky days of prehistory… and yet it wasn’t. And Mendel’s work has seen a lot more practical application than Einstein’s.
[/QUOTE]
I agree about the practicality and the originality, but Mendel’s surely a case where he ultimately had minimal practical import. It’s the bunch of people who simultaneously and independently reproduce his ideas c. 1900 - in another example of ideas being “in the air” - and who retrospectively recognise - essentially via a literature search - that Mendel had got there before them who transformed 20th century biology. If Mendel had never lived, that’d surely have still happened. Just without the footnotes.
Still, the solo accomplishment is what it is, regardless whether other people get it straight away. Isn’t that on them?
Thanks…I’m a dick often but once in awhile I play a nice guy on the web 
I’m not a physicist, but GR strikes me as a discovery that our technology needs to advance considerably before we could even see the implications (and the practical benefits) of it. Witness the recent detection of gravity waves, a century after the theory. Let’s revisit this discussion in another century or two.
Tom Lehrer for making people think and laugh as both a mathematics professor and musician.