Two Things
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Funny No one mentioned Harry Truman, the guy who dropped the Bomb making us the only nation to use nuclear weapons in wartime.
Bill Gates did not change the world. He rode the wings of Change started by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
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Mahatma Ghandi changed forever the way peacefull protest was handled with his Passive Resistance. The Manhattan Project was "Just an engineering project" the same way that Columbus just went for a little boat trip in 1492. Martin Lutherr King Jr. Changed the way people in the world think about prejudice, not just here. Open up your eyes and see what these events and people really did. There are many people in the 20th century that profoundly affected the world and many were virtual nobodies. Flemming and Lister were not well known before they changed medicine forever, not to mention Jonas Salk. Nelson Mandella and Steven Biko also made significant contributions to the 20th in a global sense. I would tend to agree that Mohamed Ali was mostly influential in North America and western Europe (might even say he wasn't that influential there). Hitler was a truly global influence. He changed the way we think about global politics forever. Richard nixon opened China up to the world, not just the US, Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin wall also a global event. Captains of industry rarely change the world but there are a few who have made an impact. Gates sadly is not one of them. His contribution was to copy and/or buy all the innovation he could get his hands on. Still produced a ton of money but little else in the way of innovation. I suppose if you had to pick something Gates did that was influencial it was how to make a corporation proof against monopoly charges, not the greatest contribution but none the less...
Scott
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Some comments on my list:
Leslie Groves ran the Manhattan Project and while he was not the scientist, he apparently was a top-notch administrator and motivator who got the personnel to get the job done. Thus enabling the US to end the war.
As for Muhammed Ali he was and is the most recognized and beloved personality in the world. (Watch the tape of Ali lighting the torch in Atlanta)
If you are wondering why I included Douglas MacArthur, my reasoning was simple, he was instrumental in winning WW II and was the force behind the rebuilding of Japan. Japan thus became an industrial powerhouse. It can also be argued that because of MacArthur's excesses, the military role in government never expanded the way some would have wished.
I have to agree that captains of Industry rarely change the world but that is because their focus is usually money not change.
I don't think Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela really need explanation. Jonas Salk provided arguably the most important vaccine ever while Thomas Edison along with others made electric distribution happen as well as other inventions. JFK was strictly a choice made because of his challenge of putting men on the moon certainly one of the most important achievements of the 20th century.
May you live to be 100 and me 100 but minus a day so I never know that nice people like you have passed away -
Hi all!
We are not from Europe, let us see what my wife and I can do. 😉
. Marie Curie
Women seriously lack in your list (apart from Mother Teresa), gentlemen! 😉
So Marie Curie impersonates science at an incredibly high-level (first person two have two Nobel prizes) and showed who women really are (first woman to have a Nobel Prize).
Add to that that she was an immigrant (she actually was born Polish), which did not simplify the matter in this early twentieth century.
. Adolf Hitler
Needless to explain his impact on the twentieth century, I believe.
. Franklin D. Roosevelt
OK, Churchill or Roosevelt? This rose a debate here. 😉
We finally concluded that Roosevelt had a deeper impact because he put an end to the 1929 crisis and won WWII, which changed the face of Europe.
. Albert Einstein
Probably the most influential scientists of all time, along with Isaac Newton. Forget about computers, CD, television and more without Einstein.
. Alan Turing
Guys, we are computer scientists! 😉
. Gandhi
Well, he devised peaceful protests, and a bit of ecology, but that is not what sounds most important to us. He also kicked off a major change in Europe, that still cause problems here, with the end of the colonies.
. Lenin
Even though Stalin may have been more influential, Lenin was the seed of USSR, and things would have been crucially different without him.
. Mao Ze Dong (that is the spelling I learnt at school 😉
China sounds like "the next big thing" here. And China is what it is now because of Mao.
. The Beatles (OK, four in one shot 😉
I strongly believe that, with their timeless melodies, The Beatles made popular music an art form.
Others also did it (yes, I love Elvis, and also Chuck Berry), but that is a personal opinion that The Beatles had, and still have, the deepest impact.
. Charles Chaplin
Chaplin made to cinema what the Beatles made to music: an art form that changed the world. Cinema, TV, DVD: everything would be so much different without Chaplin.
OK, we tried not to put too much Americans, and we end up with only one! (No, Chaplin was British, not American! 😉 )
No offense intended. United States are the most influential country of the 2Oth Century. Maybe not through individuals, but has a whole nation.
Just a word to kwhite: Muhammad Ali is not particularily famous here. For instance, my wife knows that Muhammad Ali was a major boxer, but not much more (she also knows that he and his daughter are making ads for milk ;-).)
Bye,
Xavier (With a Little Help From Pascale)
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Hi!
Correction: we ARE from Europe! 😉
While I'm at it, some of those who almost made it in our list: Martin Luther King Jr., Pablo Picasso, John F. Kennedy, Che Guevara (more for the image he left than for what he had done, by the way), Sigmund Freud (died in 1939, so he is from the 20th), Hugh Heffner (not only a joke, think about his influence), Marcel Proust, Marguerite Duras, and Coco Chanel (for her work who helped free women).
You were several to cite Bill Gates. I think a more influential businessman, in the Twentieth Century, would be Henry Ford.
And, on SQL Server Central: E.F. Codd and C. J. Date. 😉
Bye,
Xavier
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Not very deeply thought through - more a gut reaction - and certainly not in any particular order...
Nelson Mandela
Adolf Hitler
Phillip Jones Griffiths - war photgrapher, especially Vietnam. Pictures may not be able to change history, "merely" record it - but in doing so they can change public opinion
Don McCullin - another war photographer
Pope John Paul II
Josef Stalin
Michael Buerk - BBC correspondent who filed the report from Ethiopia that got Bob Geldof started on Band Aid / Live Aid / Live 8 etc
JFK
Margaret Thatcher - huge impact on UK (& Europe)... for good or ill
Aneurin Bevan - British (Welsh) politician and architect of our Welfare State
Interesting to read others' lists and be reminded of some, more obvious, choices that my memory had skipped over.
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I am surprised that nobody else has mentioned Gavrilo Princep (the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the spark for the Great War). While the event itself largely was European, it signalled the beginning of the decline and fall of the British empire and led into the establishment of the Soviet Union. Especially considering the date this weekend, have we forgot??
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John Keynes
Friedrich Hayek
(the conflict between these two schools of economic process had lasting effects on the planet. Hayek has been proven right and Keynes discredited, but the debate continues)
Robert Oppenheimer
(boom!)
Joseph Stalin
Adolph Hitler
Franklin Roosevelt
Winston Churchill
(these four affected more things & people on the planet than anyone)
Woodrow Wilson
(because he screwed up WWI and it's conclusions so badly that we're still dealing with the effects)
Henry Ford
(the idea of making things "good enough" so that they're cheap & easy to produce and have to be replaced every so often has affected the planet)
Andrew Carnegie
(endowing libraries all over the US probably helped to build the technological edge that allowed the US to lead through most of the 20th century)
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore RooseveltAuthor of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning -
Without sorting,
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Ronald Reagan
Lenin
Pope John XXIII
Winston Churchill
Ghandi
Martin Luther King
Bill Gates
Marconi
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No particular order here either:
Doyle Brunson
Antonio Estfendari
Phil Ivey
Phil Lak
Phil Helmuth
Johnnie Chan
Scotty Negyun
Daniel Negraneau
Scott Fishman
Chris (Jesus) Ferguson
A.J.
DBA with an attitude -
By the way, jesus is dead and did not live in the 20th century. Influential in the 20th century ... maybe. Alive in the 20th century ... definitely not. Now, all you bible-pedaling fools just keep your "jesus-lives-in-all-of-us-crap" to yourselves and share it at your church and not in a web forum, because honestly nobody cares about how your supersitious belief in a dead guy helped you achieve the level of ignorance it takes to live this life with "bliss". So to all you "happy-because-you-are-stupid-yet-you-say-its-because-of-jesus-and-the-holy-spirit-people", just remember...
Ignorance is bliss.
A.J.
DBA with an attitude -
Jesus loves you.
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That was funny... thanks for the laugh.
A.J.
DBA with an attitude -
He does love you. And He was alive in the twentieth century. And He is still alive today.
Robert
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Robert, i dont think the top ten list was referring to the alive in the sense of the blessed miraculous way.
But moreso the social insurance number having, tax paying ,would be on CNN with Larry King, and the following night on Leno sort of alive.
But I dont discount you at all, for I put Darth Vader, Homer Simpson and the six million dollar man on my list and noone seemed to have trouble with that.
Oh ya, jesus loves you too, not sure about Homer though.
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