The 16 Most Influential People of the 20th Century

Physicists, film stars, engineers and one band. The shape of the century depends on which of them you think actually moved it.

1. 1
   Albert Einstein

   Relativity rewrote physics, and Time made him its Person of the Century.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Mahatma Gandhi

   Made non-violent mass resistance a working political method and ended an empire's hold on India.
   587pts
3. 3
   Nelson Mandela

   Twenty-seven years in prison, then a negotiated end to apartheid rather than a war.
   567pts
4. 4
   Rosa Parks

   Refused to move seats and started the boycott that made King's name.
   512pts
5. 5
   Martin Luther King Jr.

   Led the campaign that broke legal segregation in the United States.
   468pts
6. 6
   Winston Churchill

   Held Britain in the war and then named the Iron Curtain that shaped the next forty years.
   468pts
7. 7
   Franklin D. Roosevelt

   The New Deal and four terms redefined what an American government does.
   419pts
8. 8
   Henry Ford

   The moving assembly line made cars ordinary and mass production universal.
   419pts
9. 9
   Sigmund Freud

   Gave the century a vocabulary for the mind that outlived most of his clinical claims.
   363pts
10. 10
    Alan Turing

    Cracked Enigma and then defined what a computer is before one existed.
    299pts
11. 11
    Alexander Fleming

    Noticed a contaminated petri dish and gave medicine penicillin.
    226pts
12. 12
    Marie Curie

    The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
    140pts
13. 13
    Pablo Picasso

    Co-invented Cubism and changed what a painting was allowed to look like.
    140pts
14. 14
    The Beatles

    Four musicians who reset what popular music sounded like and how it was sold.
    0pts
15. 15
    Charlie Chaplin

    The first genuinely global film star, recognisable without a soundtrack.
    0pts
16. 16
    Neil Armstrong

    First person to stand on another world, watched live by 600 million people.
    0pts

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