Browse the index

Les Misérables made poverty a moral emergency for a continent.

Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.

Explained the whole of life with one mechanism: descent with modification.

First existentialist; wrote on anxiety, despair and the leap of faith.

Wrote the first algorithm intended for a machine and saw computing beyond numbers.

Proved handwashing saves mothers' lives; ridiculed and died in an asylum.

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

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

Took the reader inside the mind that has decided to do the terrible thing.

Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.

Pea plants in a monastery garden gave the world genetics.

War and Peace; his nonviolence doctrine directly shaped Gandhi.

A Doll's House detonated 19th-century assumptions about marriage.

Four equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light — hence radio and Wi-Fi.

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

Invented dynamite, then endowed the prizes to redeem the legacy.

Arranged the elements so precisely that he could describe ones nobody had found.

The silver stain that made neurons visible.

Built and patented the first practical automobile.

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

Proved there are different sizes of infinity.

Indian-service judge whose Edinburgh Lectures gave New Thought a systematic metaphysics.

Founded neuroscience by drawing the neuron doctrine.

Alternating current, induction motors and radio principles.

Invented psychoanalysis and the modern language of the unconscious.

Quantised energy and started quantum theory.

First woman to win the literature Nobel.

Doctor-playwright who invented modern drama's subtext.

Founded anthroposophic medicine with Ita Wegman; still practised in European hospitals.

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

Wrote As a Man Thinketh, the movement's most reprinted book.

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

Ammonia synthesis feeds around half of humanity; also weaponised chlorine gas.

Isolated a pancreatic hormone before the Toronto insulin team.

Made radio a transatlantic reality.

Co-authored the founding text of anthroposophic medicine and opened its first clinic in Arlesheim.

Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.

French consul in China whose L'Acuponcture Chinoise opened the practice to Europe.

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

Opened Britain's first birth-control clinic; the charity still operates in 37 countries.

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

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

Stream of consciousness and A Room of One's Own.

Ulysses reorganised what a novel could attempt.

Kristin Lavransdatter; medieval Norway rendered with modern psychology.

Argued governments should spend in a slump — and every modern state now does.

Gave bureaucratic dread an adjective in every major language.

Creative destruction — the standard account of how innovation reshapes industries.

Quantum atom and the Copenhagen interpretation.

The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.

Filled New York auditoriums in the Depression; his writing shaped early Alcoholics Anonymous.

Built the world's first seed bank; starved to death in Stalin's prison.

Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.

Wrote as dozens of invented authors; The Book of Disquiet.

Requiem memorised by friends because writing it down was fatal.

Twice redirected philosophy — first with logical form, then with language as use.

Poet and dramatist murdered by fascists; Spain's enduring wound.

Cumulative causation and the economics of racial inequality in America.

Recast affirmation as subconscious programming for a postwar readership.

Prices as information; the intellectual engine of late-century market liberalism.