Browse the index

The Art of War is still on military and business curricula worldwide.

Standardised papermaking, the substrate of recorded civilisation.

Built the first seismoscope and mapped 2,500 stars.

Physician to gladiators and emperors whose anatomy ruled medicine for 1,400 years.

Treatise on Cold Damage remains a foundation of Chinese medicine.

Founded Madhyamaka Buddhism and its logic of emptiness.

Sanskrit's supreme dramatist; Shakuntala reached Goethe.

Gave place-value, an accurate π, and a rotating Earth in 499 CE.

First to treat zero as a number and define rules for negatives.

Systematised Advaita Vedanta and reorganised Hindu monasticism.

Tang poetry's exuberant genius, memorised across East Asia.

The 'poet-historian' whose verse recorded a dynasty's collapse.

Gave the world algebra and, through his own name, the algorithm.

Distinguished smallpox from measles and pioneered clinical case records.

Founded optics and the experimental method in the Book of Optics.

The Pillow Book invented the list-essay a millennium before the internet.

Wrote the world's first psychological novel, a thousand years ago.

Measured Earth's radius to within 1% and wrote the first comparative anthropology of India.

Wrote the medical textbook that trained Europe's doctors until 1650.

Preserved and completed Ibn Sina's corpus.

Built an astronomical clock tower with the first known escapement chain drive.

Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.

Solved cubics geometrically, reformed the calendar, wrote the Rubaiyat.

Reoriented Islamic thought toward inwardness and challenged the philosophers on their own ground.

Tusi couple; his planetary models likely reached Copernicus.

Sufi poet whose Masnavi is among the best-selling poetry on Earth today.

Persia's beloved lyric poet; his divan is still consulted as an oracle.

Sultan-astronomer whose star catalogue stood unmatched for two centuries.

Commissioned Hangul, the alphabet that made Korea literate.

Built over 300 structures including the Selimiye Mosque; Ottoman master architect.

Perfected haiku and the travel journal in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Dream of the Red Chamber, China's supreme novel, spawned its own academic field.

Founded Indian heavy industry and the philanthropic corporate model behind it.

First great synthesiser of Chinese and Western medicine; his case records still teach clinicians.

First non-European Nobel laureate; wrote two nations' anthems.

Ophthalmologist whose novels ignited the Philippine revolution; executed at 35.

Three Principles of the People underwrote the republican transformation of China.

Physician of Unani medicine who built its modern colleges and led the Indian National Congress.

Turned nonviolent resistance into a working political technology.

Founded Arya Vaidya Sala at Kottakkal and industrialised classical Ayurvedic pharmacy.

Poet-philosopher who conceived the idea of Pakistan.

Founded modern Chinese literature and diagnosed a nation in vernacular prose.

Self-taught genius whose notebooks still yield theorems a century later.

Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.

Rebuilt Hebrew as a modern literary language.

Wrote Vietnam's declaration of independence quoting Jefferson.

Principal architect of India's constitution and Dalit emancipation.

Bose–Einstein statistics; the boson is named after him.

First Japanese literature laureate; Snow Country and The Old Capital.

Rescued acupuncture from abolition and rebuilt it on anatomical terms with filiform needles.

Revived Kampo in Japan and secured its place inside the national health insurance system.

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

Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.

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

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

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

Designed the Toyota Production System — lean manufacturing worldwide.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Wrote disability, Hiroshima and postwar conscience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosopher of seed sovereignty and critic of industrial agriculture.

Freed tens of thousands of children from bonded labour.

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

Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.

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

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

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

Journalist who led Yemen's 2011 uprising.

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