Germany: the essential lives

Abbess, composer, and author of the first known European medical texts by a woman.

Industrialised the word and detonated the modern world.

Three laws of planetary motion; every satellite orbit obeys them.

Calculus notation we still use, and binary arithmetic.

The categorical imperative and the limits of knowledge.

A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.

Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.

Dialectic and the history of spirit; the pivot from which Marx and existentialism both turn.

The Prince of Mathematicians; number theory, geodesy, magnetism.

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.

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

Built and patented the first practical automobile.

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

Quantised energy and started quantum theory.

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

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

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

The uncertainty principle.

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

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