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21 figures

Hildegard of Bingen

1098 – 1179

Abbess, composer, and author of the first known European medical texts by a woman.

Germany·Medicine · Literature

Johannes Gutenberg

1400 – 1468

Industrialised the word and detonated the modern world.

Germany·EngineeringFull profile

Johannes Kepler

1571 – 1630

Three laws of planetary motion; every satellite orbit obeys them.

Germany·Astronomy · Mathematics

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1646 – 1716

Calculus notation we still use, and binary arithmetic.

Germany·Mathematics · Philosophy · Computing

Immanuel Kant

1724 – 1804

The categorical imperative and the limits of knowledge.

Germany·Philosophy

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1749 – 1832

A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.

Germany·Literature · Biology · PhilosophyFull profile

Alexander von Humboldt

1769 – 1859

Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.

Germany·Biology · Astronomy · HistoryFull profile

G. W. F. Hegel

1770 – 1831

Dialectic and the history of spirit; the pivot from which Marx and existentialism both turn.

Germany·Philosophy

Carl Friedrich Gauss

1777 – 1855

The Prince of Mathematicians; number theory, geodesy, magnetism.

Germany·Mathematics · Astronomy · Physics

Karl Marx

1818 – 1883

Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.

Germany·Political Economy · Philosophy

Friedrich Engels

1820 – 1895

The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.

Germany·Political Economy · History

Nikolaus Otto

1832 – 1891

The four-stroke engine that moved the 20th century.

Germany·Engineering

Karl Benz

1844 – 1929

Built and patented the first practical automobile.

Germany·Engineering

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 – 1900

Genealogy of morals, the will to power and the revaluation of all values.

Germany·Philosophy · Literature

Max Planck

1858 – 1947

Quantised energy and started quantum theory.

Germany·PhysicsNobel

Max Weber

1864 – 1920

Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.

Germany·Political Economy · History

Albert Einstein

1879 – 1955

Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.

Germany·PhysicsNobelFull profile

Emmy Noether

1882 – 1935

Noether's theorem links symmetry to conservation laws — the backbone of modern physics.

Germany·Mathematics · Physics

Werner Heisenberg

1901 – 1976

The uncertainty principle.

Germany·PhysicsNobel

Hannah Arendt

1906 – 1975

The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the reference work on how republics fail.

Germany·Politics · Philosophy · Human Rights

Konrad Zuse

1910 – 1995

Built the first programmable digital computer, the Z3, in 1941.

Germany·Computing · Engineering