The 18th century

Translated Newton into French and established kinetic energy as mv².

Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.

Binomial nomenclature: every species on Earth still carries his two-name system.

The most prolific mathematician ever; wrote much of modern notation.

Proposed an atomic force theory two centuries early.

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

The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a discipline.

The categorical imperative and the limits of knowledge.

Named oxygen, killed phlogiston, founded modern chemistry; guillotined at 50.

Built the first battery; the volt is his.

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

Invented vaccination; smallpox is the only human disease ever eradicated.

Designed American public credit, the national bank and industrial policy.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded feminist political theory.

Population pressure as an economic law; the argument every food and climate debate revisits.

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.

Comparative advantage and rent theory — still the core argument for trade.

Free indirect style and the social novel; still the most adapted author in English.

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

Led six nations to independence and drafted their founding constitutions.

A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.

Frankenstein invented science fiction and the ethics-of-creation debate.