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Category
Era
35 figures
Shiv Sharma
1906 – 1980Led the campaign that won Ayurveda statutory recognition in independent India.
Hideki Yukawa
1907 – 1981Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.
Zhu Lian
1909 – 1978Wrote New Acupuncture (1951) and led the state institute that standardised the practice.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
1910 – 1995Worked out at nineteen why some stars must collapse into black holes.
Yoshio Manaka
1911 – 1989Surgeon-acupuncturist who built a biophysical model of meridian therapy.
Taiichi Ohno
1912 – 1990Designed the Toyota Production System — lean manufacturing worldwide.
Deng Tietao
1916 – 2019Master physician of Guangzhou whose spleen-stomach theory shaped modern TCM curricula.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
1918 – 2008Exported Transcendental Meditation and revived classical Ayurveda as a global health programme.
B. K. S. Iyengar
1918 – 2014Turned yoga into a precise therapeutic method taught in clinics and studios worldwide.
Brihaspati Dev Triguna
1920 – 2013The century's most celebrated pulse diagnostician; chaired India's central Ayurvedic council.
Tenzin Choedrak
1922 – 2001Personal physician to the Dalai Lama who preserved Tibetan medicine through 17 years of imprisonment.
Lee Kuan Yew
1923 – 2015Turned a port city into a high-income state — the developmental-state exemplar and its critics.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
1925 – 2006Composed the Buru Quartet orally in a prison camp.
Abdus Salam
1926 – 1996Unified the electromagnetic and weak forces; first Muslim science laureate.
Michio Kushi
1926 – 2014Carried macrobiotics from postwar Japan to the West and into the diet-and-disease debate.
Tu Youyou
b. 1930Extracted artemisinin from ancient texts; millions of malaria deaths averted.
Amartya Sen
b. 1933Recast famine as a failure of entitlement, not food supply.
Daniel Kahneman
1934 – 2024Prospect theory founded behavioural economics and modern policy 'nudging'.
Kenzaburō Ōe
1935 – 2023Wrote disability, Hiroshima and postwar conscience.
Ada Yonath
b. 1939Mapped the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and antibiotic target.
Muhammad Yunus
b. 1940Lent $27 of his own money and started a global industry for the poor.
Ashok Vaidya
1940 – 2023Pioneer of reverse pharmacology, translating classical formulas into clinical trials.
Vasant Lad
b. 1943Founded the Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico and trained the first Western practitioners.
Aung San Suu Kyi
b. 1945Fifteen years under house arrest; later a contested civilian leader.
Deepak Chopra
b. 1946Endocrinologist turned global voice of mind-body medicine; contested by clinical researchers.
Orhan Pamuk
b. 1952Novelist of Istanbul's melancholy and East–West fracture.
Vandana Shiva
b. 1952Philosopher of seed sovereignty and critic of industrial agriculture.
Kailash Satyarthi
b. 1954Freed tens of thousands of children from bonded labour.
Mo Yan
b. 1955Hallucinatory realism of rural Shandong across China's violent century.
Shinya Yamanaka
b. 1962Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.
Ha-Joon Chang
b. 1963Kicking Away the Ladder documented how rich states industrialised behind protection.
Baba Ramdev
b. 1965Made yoga and Ayurveda a mass movement and a corporate empire; repeatedly censured over health claims.
Han Kang
b. 1970Confronts historical trauma and bodily fragility; The Vegetarian, Human Acts.
Tawakkol Karman
b. 1979Journalist who led Yemen's 2011 uprising.
Malala Yousafzai
b. 1997Shot for going to school; now the youngest Nobel laureate in history.