The Most Famous Scientists and Inventors

1. How to judge a scientist's fame

Scientific fame is different from the fame of a singer or a footballer. A pop star is famous because millions of people enjoy their work directly. A scientist is usually famous because their ideas changed what other scientists believe, or because an invention changed how ordinary people live, often long after the work was done. Gregor Mendel, the monk who discovered the laws of inheritance by breeding pea plants in the 1860s, was almost unknown in his lifetime; his work was rediscovered decades after his death and is now taught in every school. Fame in science is often slow, and it is often awarded by other scientists first and by the public much later.

That delay makes judging scientific fame a matter of looking at lasting influence rather than headlines. The people on this shortlist are those whose names are still attached to the ideas they produced: Newton's laws of motion, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Einstein's theory of relativity, Curie's work on radioactivity, Turing's model of computing. In each case the name survives because the idea survived, tested and confirmed by generations of researchers. A second test is whether the work changed daily life: the light bulb, the telephone, the aeroplane, the web. The inventors on this list pass that test too, because their devices became part of the furniture of the modern world.

A third question matters as well: who gets remembered, and who is forgotten. The history of science has often overlooked women, and researchers from outside Europe and North America, even when their contributions were essential. Rosalind Franklin's role in the discovery of the structure of DNA was recognised only decades after her death. Ada Lovelace, who wrote about the potential of the Analytical Engine in the 1840s, was treated as a curiosity in her own time and is now recognised as a pioneer of computing. This article includes those stories, because a fair shortlist must show not only who became famous, but how fame in science has sometimes arrived late, or not at all.

2. The founders of modern physics

Isaac Newton, born in England in 1643, is widely regarded as the most influential scientist of the early modern period, and one of the most famous scientists of all time. In his book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, he set out the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, showing that the same force that makes an apple fall also holds the Moon in orbit around the Earth. He also developed calculus, independently of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and built the first reflecting telescope. Newton's achievement was to show that the universe obeys mathematical laws that human beings can discover, an idea that shaped science for the next two centuries.

Albert Einstein, born in Germany in 1879, remade physics again in the twentieth century. In 1905, his so-called miracle year, he published papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and special relativity, and in 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity, which described gravity as the curvature of space and time. The theory was confirmed in 1919, when a solar eclipse expedition led by Arthur Eddington observed the bending of starlight exactly as Einstein had predicted, and Einstein became a world celebrity overnight. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, for his work on the photoelectric effect rather than relativity, and he spent his later years in the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany. His face, with its wild white hair, became the visual shorthand for genius itself.

Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska in Poland in 1867, is the most famous woman in the history of science, and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. Working with her husband Pierre Curie in a poorly equipped laboratory in Paris, she discovered the elements polonium and radium and coined the term radioactivity. Her work laid the foundations of nuclear physics and of the medical use of radiation, and she died in 1934 from illnesses believed to have been caused by her long exposure to radioactive materials. Her story is also a story of persistence against prejudice: as a woman and a foreigner in French science, she was repeatedly denied positions and honours that men of lesser achievement received, and her fame today rests as much on that struggle as on her discoveries.

3. The biologists who changed how we see life

Charles Darwin, born in England in 1809, published On the Origin of Species in 1859, setting out the theory of evolution by natural selection. Drawing on his five-year voyage on the survey ship Beagle and on years of careful observation and experiment, Darwin argued that species change over time, that the individuals best suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, and that all living things share common ancestors. The idea was controversial from the start, because it challenged the belief that species had been created in their present form, and it remains controversial in some religious communities today, even though it is accepted by the overwhelming majority of biologists. Darwin's fame rests on the scale of the idea: it changed biology as completely as Newton changed physics, and it changed how human beings see their own place in nature.

Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk working in what is now the Czech Republic, discovered the basic laws of inheritance by breeding pea plants in the 1850s and 1860s, showing that traits are passed from parents to offspring in predictable patterns. His paper was published in 1866 and almost entirely ignored until 1900, when three other scientists independently reached similar conclusions and rediscovered his work. The delay is one of the most famous stories in science, and it shows how easily important work can be missed. Rosalind Franklin, working in London in the early 1950s, produced the X-ray photograph known as Photo 51, which provided crucial evidence for the double-helix structure of DNA. The structure was published by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, who had seen her photograph without her full knowledge, and Franklin died in 1958, four years before Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize. Her contribution is now widely recognised, and her story is taught as a warning about how credit in science can go to the wrong people.

Abdus Salam, born in Punjab in 1926, was a Pakistani theoretical physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work unifying the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force, one of the fundamental forces of nature. He was the first Muslim scientist to win a Nobel Prize in science and the first Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize in any field. He also founded the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to support scientists from developing countries, a project that reflected his belief that science belonged to the whole world and not only to rich nations. His life shows that the most famous scientists are not always those who work in the most famous laboratories, and that a scientist from a small town can change the foundations of physics.

4. The inventors who rebuilt daily life

Thomas Edison, born in the United States in 1847, was the most prolific inventor of his age, holding more than a thousand patents in the United States. His best-known inventions were the phonograph, the first practical electric light bulb, and the first system for generating and distributing electric power. Edison's real invention, some historians argue, was not any single device but the research laboratory itself: at Menlo Park in New Jersey he gathered a team of engineers and machinists who worked systematically on practical problems, a model that every large technology company now follows. His rivalry with Nikola Tesla over direct current and alternating current, the so-called War of the Currents, ended with Tesla's alternating current becoming the standard for power distribution, a reminder that the best-known inventor is not always the one whose technology wins.

Nikola Tesla, born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, was a Serbian-American inventor whose work on alternating current, the induction motor and wireless transmission made the modern electrical age possible. He was a brilliant and eccentric figure who died poor and largely forgotten in 1943, and his reputation was revived only decades later, when engineers and the public rediscovered the scale of his ideas. The electric car company named after him, founded more than half a century after his death, helped make his name known to a new generation. Alexander Graham Bell, born in Scotland in 1847, invented the telephone in 1876 and founded the company that became the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, while Guglielmo Marconi, born in Italy in 1874, developed the first practical system of wireless telegraphy and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901. Together, Bell and Marconi made instant communication over distance possible, and their inventions are the ancestors of every phone call and radio broadcast today.

Other inventors changed the world in quieter ways. James Watt, the Scottish engineer, did not invent the steam engine, but his improvements to it in the 1770s and 1780s made it efficient enough to power factories, mines and ships, and so made the Industrial Revolution possible. Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, developed in Germany around 1440, made books cheap enough for ordinary people to own and is often called the most important invention of the second millennium. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but his moving assembly line, introduced in 1913, made cars cheap enough for working people to buy and changed manufacturing everywhere. Each of these inventors is famous not for a single flash of inspiration, but for making an idea practical, affordable and widespread.

5. The pioneers of computing

Ada Lovelace, born in England in 1815 as the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, worked with the mathematician Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that was never built in their lifetimes. In her notes on the engine, published in 1843, she described how it could be programmed to do far more than arithmetic, including composing music, and she is now widely regarded as the first computer programmer. Alan Turing, born in England in 1912, laid the theoretical foundations of computing in 1936 with his description of the universal machine, now called the Turing machine, and during the Second World War he led the work at Bletchley Park that broke the German Enigma code, an achievement that is credited with shortening the war. After the war he was prosecuted for homosexuality, then a crime in Britain, and he died in 1954 at the age of forty-one. He received a royal pardon in 2013, and his face now appears on the British fifty-pound note.

Tim Berners-Lee, born in England in 1955, invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, writing the first web browser and the first web server and giving the web away free for anyone to use. The decision not to patent the web, and to make its standards open, is one of the reasons it spread so quickly, and Berners-Lee has spent much of his later career arguing for an open web and for the protection of privacy online. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, is the most famous figure in the business of computing, known for products such as the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and for a style of product design that made technology feel personal and desirable. Jobs did not invent the technologies inside his products, but he understood better than anyone how to make them usable and how to present them to the world.

Stephen Hawking, the British physicist who held Newton's old chair at Cambridge, became the most famous scientist of the late twentieth century through his work on black holes and the origin of the universe, and through his book A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, which became one of the best-selling popular science books ever written. Diagnosed with motor neurone disease in his twenties and given only a few years to live, he continued working for more than fifty years, communicating through a speech synthesiser as his body failed. His fame came from the combination of profound ideas, a gift for explaining them, and a life story that seemed to defy the odds. He shows that in the modern age a scientist can become famous in the same way as a writer or an actor: by telling a great story well.

6. The forgotten and the disputed

No shortlist of famous scientists is complete without asking who was left out. For centuries, women were excluded from universities and laboratories, and their work was often published under a man's name or credited to a male colleague. Lise Meitner, the Austrian physicist who with Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission in 1938, was excluded from the Nobel Prize that Hahn received in 1944, an omission that is now regarded as one of the great injustices in the history of the prize. Chien-Shiung Wu, the Chinese-American physicist whose experiment in 1956 disproved the conservation of parity, was likewise passed over when the Nobel Prize for that discovery went to her male colleagues. These cases are now taught alongside the discoveries themselves, as part of the history of science.

Credit is also disputed in cases where several people reached the same idea at the same time. Newton and Leibniz both developed calculus, and their supporters quarrelled bitterly over who had been first. Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both arrived at the theory of evolution by natural selection, and Darwin published first only because Wallace sent him his own paper and forced him to act. Edison and Joseph Swan both developed the electric light bulb, and their companies eventually merged. These disputes do not diminish the achievements; they show that science is a shared enterprise, and that the person who becomes famous is often the one who publishes first, explains best, or builds the strongest institution, rather than the only person who had the idea.

There is also the question of inventors whose fame is national rather than global. In the Islamic Golden Age, scholars such as Ibn al-Haytham, who wrote the first systematic work on optics in the eleventh century, and al-Khwarizmi, whose name gives us the word algorithm, laid foundations that European science later built on, yet they are far less known in the West than Newton or Einstein. In China, inventors of paper, printing, the compass and gunpowder changed the world centuries before Europe adopted them. A truly global list of famous scientists and inventors would include many more names than this article can cover, and readers are encouraged to treat this shortlist as a starting point, not a final answer.

7. Why these names endure

The scientists and inventors on this list share something that goes beyond intelligence: each of them changed the frame through which other people see the world. Newton made the universe a machine that could be understood. Darwin made human beings part of nature rather than apart from it. Einstein made time and space flexible. Curie made the invisible atom a source of power and danger. Turing made the idea of a machine that could think a practical question. Berners-Lee made the world's knowledge available to anyone with a connection. These are not small improvements to existing knowledge; they are changes in the questions that science asks, and that is why their names have lasted.

Their fame also endures because their work is still used every day. The electricity in a home runs on Tesla's alternating current. The phone in a pocket descends from Bell and Marconi. The computer that runs the web descends from Turing and Berners-Lee. The medicine in a hospital descends from Curie and from the biology that Darwin and Mendel founded. A singer's songs may go out of fashion, and a politician's party may lose power, but an idea that works does not go out of fashion. That is the deepest reason why scientists and inventors hold a special place in public memory: their fame is anchored in things that are still true and still useful.

Finally, their stories endure because they are human stories. Newton was difficult and secretive. Darwin was anxious about publishing. Curie worked in a leaking shed. Turing was persecuted by the country he had helped to save. Lovelace was dismissed as a dilettante. Hawking lived for decades with a disease that should have killed him quickly. The public remembers these lives because they show that great science is not done by perfect people in perfect conditions, but by stubborn, curious, sometimes difficult human beings who kept asking questions when others had stopped. That is the most useful lesson of their fame, and the reason their names are still worth learning.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Isaac Newton
• Wikipedia — Isaac Newton
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Albert Einstein
• Wikipedia — Albert Einstein
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Marie Curie
• Wikipedia — Marie Curie
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Charles Darwin
• Wikipedia — Alan Turing
• Wikipedia — Tim Berners-Lee

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• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.