Browse the index

The uncertainty principle.

Centre-periphery theory drove Latin American development strategy for decades.

Falsifiability became science's demarcation criterion.

Independent People gave a small nation a world literature.

Discovered jumping genes decades before the field caught up.

Computer architecture, game theory, quantum foundations.

Imperfect competition and a lifelong challenge to orthodox capital theory.

Canto General and the love poems memorised across a continent.

The Seven Countries Study put diet at the centre of cardiovascular prevention.

Existentialism's public face; declined the Nobel Prize in 1964.

Crowds and Power analysed mass psychology and dictatorship.

Taught imagination as the sole creative power; 'assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled'.

Logotherapy: meaning as the primary human drive, tested in the camps.

Poet-president who co-founded Négritude.

Incompleteness theorems set permanent limits on formal systems.

Built the first compiler and made programming languages English-like.

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

Led the campaign that won Ayurveda statutory recognition in independent India.

Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.

Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.

The Second Sex founded modern feminist philosophy.

Discovered nerve growth factor in a bedroom lab under fascist persecution.

Invented management as a discipline and named the knowledge worker.

Led Ghana to independence and theorised neo-colonial economic dependence.

Wrote New Acupuncture (1951) and led the state institute that standardised the practice.

Wrote on attention, affliction and rootedness while working the factory floor.

Worked out at nineteen why some stars must collapse into black holes.

Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin by X-ray.

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

Chronicled Cairo across a century in the Cairo Trilogy.

The Captive Mind dissected intellectual submission to totalitarianism.

Surgeon-acupuncturist who built a biophysical model of meridian therapy.

Linked dietary fibre to Western disease patterns after describing Burkitt's lymphoma in Uganda.

Defined what a computer is, then was destroyed by the country he saved.

Voss and the interior epic of the Australian continent.

Monetarism, floating exchange rates and a generation of deregulation.

Designed the Toyota Production System — lean manufacturing worldwide.

Founded deep ecology and the case for nature's intrinsic worth.

The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus; absurdism as an ethic.

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

Polio vaccine, unpatented — 'could you patent the sun?'

The Labyrinth of Solitude defined Mexican self-understanding.

Co-authored the monetary history that reshaped central banking doctrine.

Mathematised economics and wrote the textbook that taught the postwar world.

Co-described the double helix and the central dogma of molecular biology.

Information theory: the bit, and the mathematics of all digital communication.

Shared the DNA structure Nobel.

Master physician of Guangzhou whose spleen-stomach theory shaped modern TCM curricula.

Ran the first double-blind trials in psychiatry and founded orthomolecular medicine with high-dose niacin.

Menninger researcher who founded clinical biofeedback and self-regulation therapy.

Twenty-seven years in prison, then negotiated the end of apartheid without civil war.

The Gulag Archipelago broke the Soviet system's moral standing.

QED, nanotechnology's founding lecture, and the Challenger diagnosis.

Exported Transcendental Meditation and revived classical Ayurveda as a global health programme.

Turned yoga into a precise therapeutic method taught in clinics and studios worldwide.

Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.

The Sovereignty of Good returned attention and love to moral philosophy.

Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.

Mapped the ocean floor and proved continental drift.

Interior, philosophical fiction now a global cult.

The century's most celebrated pulse diagnostician; chaired India's central Ayurvedic council.

A Theory of Justice: fairness derived from behind the veil of ignorance.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed rewrote literacy teaching for the global south.

Blindness and the parable of institutional collapse.

Personal physician to the Dalai Lama who preserved Tibetan medicine through 17 years of imprisonment.

Novelist of apartheid's moral interior; banned repeatedly at home.

Father of African cinema and novelist of colonial labour.

Turned a port city into a high-income state — the developmental-state exemplar and its critics.

Founded Five Element acupuncture and the colleges that carried it across the English-speaking world.

Agronomist whose theory of culture and liberation shaped decolonisation.

The Fire Next Time; the most precise prose on American race ever written.

Psychiatrist whose Wretched of the Earth remains the core text of decolonisation.

Composed the Buru Quartet orally in a prison camp.

Unified the electromagnetic and weak forces; first Muslim science laureate.

Carried macrobiotics from postwar Japan to the West and into the diet-and-disease debate.

Her arrest and trial in California led directly to acupuncture's legalisation in the state.

You Can Heal Your Life and Hay House globalised affirmation culture; its health claims are contested.

Made the impossible ordinary and gave Latin America its own way of telling time.

Wrote postcolonial disillusion in a French bent to Malinké speech.

Monoclonal antibodies — now a $200bn class of medicines.

Conductive polymers — flexible screens and printed electronics.

Unity minister whose prosperity books shaped late-century abundance teaching.

So Long a Letter reframed West African women's writing.

Predicted the boson that gives particles mass, found 48 years later.

Letter from Birmingham Jail and a movement that rewrote American law.

Told the African story from the inside, and ended the colonial monopoly on narrative.

Extracted artemisinin from ancient texts; millions of malaria deaths averted.

Omeros transplanted Homer to the Caribbean.

Theorised 'nation language' and Caribbean creolisation.

Wrote Black American interior life without explaining it to anyone.

Physician and writer who broke silence on FGM and patriarchy in the Arab world.

Made the short story carry the weight of novels.

Built modern African philosophy on Akan concepts and consensual democracy.

A House for Mr Biswas and a contested postcolonial vision.

Systematised classical homeopathy teaching; Right Livelihood laureate in 1996.

Defined the 'triple heritage' framework for African identity.

Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.

Showed communities can govern shared resources without markets or states.

First African Nobel laureate in Literature; playwright and political prisoner.

Prospect theory founded behavioural economics and modern policy 'nudging'.

Wrote disability, Hiroshima and postwar conscience.

Co-led the Adverse Childhood Experiences study linking childhood trauma to lifelong disease.

Documented the relaxation response at Harvard and made mind-body medicine measurable.

Novelist and filmmaker of Algerian women's silenced history.

Anatomies of power across the Andes and the Caribbean.

Framed clinical practice around the tack rule — take out what harms, put in what's missing.

Wrote exile, madness and belonging from a Serowe refugee life.

Abandoned English for Gikuyu and made language itself an anticolonial act.

Africa's first elected woman head of state; rebuilt post-war Liberia.

UN Secretary-General who put human security at the centre of the organisation.

Built The Healer's Art curriculum, taught in medical schools on four continents.

Mapped the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and antibiotic target.

The Handmaid's Tale became the global shorthand for reproductive coercion.

Founded modern Pacific Island literature in English.

'Our Sea of Islands' reframed the Pacific as vast, not small.

Lent $27 of his own money and started a global industry for the poor.

Austere novelist of power and complicity; Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians.

Green Belt Movement founder; 51 million trees and a democracy campaign.

Brokered peace across five Central American wars.

Open Veins of Latin America reframed a hemisphere's economic history.

Pioneer of reverse pharmacology, translating classical formulas into clinical trials.

First songwriter awarded the literature Nobel.

Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.

Founded the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and trained a generation of fellows.

Proved CFCs destroy ozone; his work produced the Montreal Protocol.

Founded the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico and trained the first Western practitioners.

His cube became a global object lesson in group theory.

First published Māori novelist; The Whale Rider.

Created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in 1979; now standard in clinics worldwide.

Physician of addiction and trauma; reframed illness as a response to lived adversity.

Chronicled dictatorship and diaspora across three novel trilogies.

Fifteen years under house arrest; later a contested civilian leader.

The Foundations of Chinese Medicine became the standard Western textbook of the field.

Founded femtochemistry, filming chemical bonds as they break.

Coined and codified functional medicine; founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991.

Discovered the opiate receptor and argued the body is a single emotional-molecular network.

Endocrinologist turned global voice of mind-body medicine; contested by clinical researchers.

Wrote The Web That Has No Weaver, then founded Harvard's programme in placebo studies.

Capabilities approach to justice, and a defence of emotion in public reason.

Wrote the refugee not as a statistic but as a person with a prior life.

Built a new documentary genre from thousands of interviews.

Discovered telomerase, central to ageing and cancer research.

Co-founded Bastyr University, the first accredited natural-medicine university in the United States.

Vedic scholar whose texts linked Ayurveda, yoga and jyotish for Western students.

Ended a 52-year civil war by negotiated accord.

Drank the bacterium to prove ulcers are infectious, not stress.

Novelist of Istanbul's melancholy and East–West fracture.

Philosopher of seed sovereignty and critic of industrial agriculture.

Proved lifestyle change can reverse coronary artery disease; first such programme reimbursed by Medicare.

First Westerner to earn India's BAMS degree and license; interpreter of Ayurveda for the West.

Freed tens of thousands of children from bonded labour.

Neurologist who put diet, glycemia and the microbiome at the centre of brain health.

Wrote the web and gave it away for nothing.

Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.

Surgeon who has treated tens of thousands of survivors of wartime sexual violence.

Biologist-novelist who reinvented Portuguese in Mozambican terms.

Hallucinatory realism of rural Shandong across China's violent century.

Reversed her own progressive MS disability with a mitochondrial-nutrition protocol, then trialled it.

His 1993 survey of unconventional therapy use forced US medicine to take the field seriously.

Directed the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine and built the evidence agenda for whole-person care.

Founded Agape International and carried New Thought to a global multiracial audience.

Nervous Conditions opened African women's fiction to a global readership.

The Famished Road brought African magical realism to the Booker.

Co-discovered nucleoside-modified mRNA.

Indigenous rights advocate whose testimonio reached the world.

Took functional medicine mainstream through the Cleveland Clinic Center and a run of bestsellers.

Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.

Flights and The Books of Jacob; constellation-form fiction.

Kicking Away the Ladder documented how rich states industrialised behind protection.

Herbalist-physician who shaped US botanical-medicine standards and education.

CRISPR gene editing, now in approved sickle-cell therapy.

Made yoga and Ayurveda a mass movement and a corporate empire; repeatedly censured over health claims.

The Entrepreneurial State reframed public investment as the source of major innovation.

Confronts historical trauma and bodily fragility; The Vegetarian, Human Acts.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century put wealth inequality data at the centre of policy.

Led the women's movement that ended Liberia's civil war.

Randomised trials made development aid an experimental science.

Negotiated the Eritrea peace accord; later a contested wartime leader.

Half of a Yellow Sun and a feminism that reached a global generation.

Journalist who led Yemen's 2011 uprising.

Shot for going to school; now the youngest Nobel laureate in history.