People whose work was dismissed, misfiled or credited elsewhere while they were alive. A few were vindicated within a decade; others waited a century.
1Alan TuringBroke Enigma and defined computation, then was prosecuted for being gay and pardoned only in 2013.1000pts
2Ignaz SemmelweisProved handwashing saved mothers' lives, was ridiculed by his profession and died in an asylum.600pts
3Kurt GodelShowed mathematics can never prove all its own truths, then spent his last years in isolation.551pts
4Galileo GalileiTried by the Inquisition for arguing that the Earth moves; formally rehabilitated in 1992.494pts
5Charles BabbageDesigned a programmable computer in the 1830s and never finished building one.494pts
6Ludwig BoltzmannFought for the reality of atoms against senior colleagues and died before the argument was won.428pts
7Nikola TeslaDied in a New York hotel room in debt, decades before the internet made him a folk hero.350pts
8Vincent van GoghSold almost nothing in his lifetime and now anchors the most expensive rooms in any museum.257pts
9Srinivasa RamanujanA self-taught clerk from Madras whose notebooks are still yielding new mathematics.257pts
10Alfred WegenerProposed continental drift in 1912 and was mocked until plate tectonics proved him right.257pts
11Thomas EdisonRemembered as a patent machine and a businessman, which undersells the research method he invented.257pts
12Ada LovelaceWrote the first algorithm intended for a machine, and was read as a footnote to Babbage for a century.257pts
13Emily DickinsonPublished fewer than a dozen poems while alive; nearly 1,800 were found after her death.257pts
14Gregor MendelHis pea experiments founded genetics and were ignored for 35 years.0pts
15Rosalind FranklinHer X-ray images made the double helix visible; the Nobel went to three men.0pts
16Evariste GaloisFounded group theory as a teenager, had his papers lost or rejected by the Academy and died in a duel at twenty in 1832.
17Georg CantorProved that some infinities are larger than others and was attacked for it by leading mathematicians of his day, spending long spells in sanatoriums.
18SocratesSentenced to death by Athens in 399 BC for impiety and corrupting the young, he wrote nothing and survives only through his students.
19Giordano BrunoArgued for an infinite universe full of other suns and worlds and was burned in Rome for heresy in 1600.
20Franz KafkaPublished little in his lifetime and asked for his manuscripts to be burned; his friend Max Brod published The Trial instead.
21Herman MelvilleMoby-Dick sold poorly in 1851 and he died a forgotten customs inspector, decades before the book was recognised as a masterpiece.
22Friedrich NietzscheCollapsed in 1889, after which his sister reshaped his writings into nationalist propaganda he had openly despised.
23Niccolo MachiavelliHis name became shorthand for cynical scheming, though The Prince was a sober study of power by a committed republican.
24Hedy LamarrHollywood star who co-patented frequency hopping in 1942, an idea the US Navy shelved and later wireless technology relied on.
25Barbara McClintockDiscovered jumping genes in maize in the 1940s, was largely ignored for decades and won the Nobel Prize alone in 1983.
26Robert H. GoddardLaunched the first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926 after The New York Times mocked his ideas, a mistake the paper corrected in 1969.
27Johann Sebastian BachConsidered old-fashioned when he died in 1750 and rarely performed until Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion in 1829.
28Edgar Allan PoeDied poor at forty, and a rival's hostile obituary painted him as a mad drunk for a century after.
29Lise MeitnerGave the first explanation of nuclear fission in 1939, yet the Nobel Prize for the discovery went to Otto Hahn alone.
