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

Albert Einstein

Relativity rewrote physics, and Time made him its Person of the Century.

1000pts

2

Mahatma Gandhi

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

587pts

3

Nelson Mandela

Twenty-seven years in prison, then a negotiated end to apartheid rather than a war.

567pts

4

Rosa Parks

Refused to move seats and started the boycott that made King's name.

512pts

5

Martin Luther King Jr.

Led the campaign that broke legal segregation in the United States.

468pts

6

Winston Churchill

Held Britain in the war and then named the Iron Curtain that shaped the next forty years.

468pts

7

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The New Deal and four terms redefined what an American government does.

419pts

8

Henry Ford

The moving assembly line made cars ordinary and mass production universal.

419pts

9

Sigmund Freud

Gave the century a vocabulary for the mind that outlived most of his clinical claims.

363pts

10

Alan Turing

Cracked Enigma and then defined what a computer is before one existed.

299pts

11

Alexander Fleming

Noticed a contaminated petri dish and gave medicine penicillin.

226pts

12

Marie Curie

The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

140pts

13

Pablo Picasso

Co-invented Cubism and changed what a painting was allowed to look like.

140pts

14

The Beatles

Four musicians who reset what popular music sounded like and how it was sold.

38pts

15

Charlie Chaplin

The first genuinely global film star, recognisable without a soundtrack.

38pts

16

Neil Armstrong

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

38pts