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Category
Era
20 figures
Leonardo da Vinci
1452 – 1519Proved that art and science are one act of looking.
Niccolò Machiavelli
1469 – 1527The Prince separated political analysis from moral instruction.
Copernicus
1473 – 1543Moved the Earth from the centre of the universe.
Andreas Vesalius
1514 – 1564Dissected humans himself and corrected Galen; founded modern anatomy.
Miguel de Cervantes
1547 – 1616Don Quixote, the first modern novel and the most translated after the Bible.
William Shakespeare
1564 – 1616Built the language most of the planet now negotiates in.
Galileo Galilei
1564 – 1642Pointed a telescope upward and broke the authority of the ancients.
Johannes Kepler
1571 – 1630Three laws of planetary motion; every satellite orbit obeys them.
Jan Baptist van Helmont
1580 – 1644Coined 'gas' and ran the first quantitative plant-growth experiment.
Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679Leviathan founded the modern theory of sovereignty and the social contract.
René Descartes
1596 – 1650Cogito ergo sum and coordinate geometry.
Blaise Pascal
1623 – 1662Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.
Christiaan Huygens
1629 – 1695Wave theory of light, the pendulum clock, Saturn's rings.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
1632 – 1723Ground lenses in a draper's shop and discovered the microbial world.
John Locke
1632 – 1704Consent, property and toleration — the template for liberal constitutions.
Baruch Spinoza
1632 – 1677Ethics identified God with Nature and grounded secular democratic thought.
Isaac Newton
1643 – 1727Showed that one law governs the apple and the Moon alike.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646 – 1716Calculus notation we still use, and binary arithmetic.
Montesquieu
1689 – 1755Separation of powers, copied into nearly every written constitution since.
Voltaire
1694 – 1778Weaponised satire for tolerance and free expression.