# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 18, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-16-most-influential-people-of-the-20th-century*

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## Current results (5 votes)

1. **Albert Einstein** — 80% (4 votes · score 1000/1000)
   Relativity rewrote physics, and Time made him its Person of the Century.
2. **Mahatma Gandhi** — 0% (0 votes · score 587/1000)
   Made non-violent mass resistance a working political method and ended an empire's hold on India.
3. **Nelson Mandela** — 20% (1 votes · score 567/1000)
   Twenty-seven years in prison, then a negotiated end to apartheid rather than a war.
4. **Rosa Parks** — 0% (0 votes · score 512/1000)
   Refused to move seats and started the boycott that made King's name.
5. **Martin Luther King Jr.** — 0% (0 votes · score 468/1000)
   Led the campaign that broke legal segregation in the United States.
6. **Winston Churchill** — 0% (0 votes · score 468/1000)
   Held Britain in the war and then named the Iron Curtain that shaped the next forty years.
7. **Franklin D. Roosevelt** — 0% (0 votes · score 419/1000)
   The New Deal and four terms redefined what an American government does.
8. **Henry Ford** — 0% (0 votes · score 419/1000)
   The moving assembly line made cars ordinary and mass production universal.
9. **Sigmund Freud** — 0% (0 votes · score 363/1000)
   Gave the century a vocabulary for the mind that outlived most of his clinical claims.
10. **Alan Turing** — 0% (0 votes · score 299/1000)
   Cracked Enigma and then defined what a computer is before one existed.
11. **Alexander Fleming** — 0% (0 votes · score 226/1000)
   Noticed a contaminated petri dish and gave medicine penicillin.
12. **Marie Curie** — 0% (0 votes · score 140/1000)
   The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
13. **Pablo Picasso** — 0% (0 votes · score 140/1000)
   Co-invented Cubism and changed what a painting was allowed to look like.
14. **The Beatles** — 0% (0 votes · score 38/1000)
   Four musicians who reset what popular music sounded like and how it was sold.
15. **Charlie Chaplin** — 0% (0 votes · score 38/1000)
   The first genuinely global film star, recognisable without a soundtrack.
16. **Neil Armstrong** — 0% (0 votes · score 38/1000)
   First person to stand on another world, watched live by 600 million people.

Tags: 20th century, all-time