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Translated Newton into French and established kinetic energy as mv².

Binomial nomenclature: every species on Earth still carries his two-name system.

The most prolific mathematician ever; wrote much of modern notation.

Proposed an atomic force theory two centuries early.

The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.

The categorical imperative and the limits of knowledge.

Named oxygen, killed phlogiston, founded modern chemistry; guillotined at 50.

Built the first battery; the volt is his.

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

Invented vaccination; smallpox is the only human disease ever eradicated.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.

Population pressure as an economic law; the argument every food and climate debate revisits.

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

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

Comparative advantage and rent theory — still the core argument for trade.

Free indirect style and the social novel; still the most adapted author in English.

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

A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.

Frankenstein invented science fiction and the ethics-of-creation debate.