Important people you should know about

Dan

Dan

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So I am procrastinating, and I thought I would come up with a list of people throughout history that I think were very important or that I want to know more about. The idea is that I will try to learn the brief biography of each of these people or their important works if I don't already. Generally I've included anybody that you might quote or throw out an anecdote about to sound smart in front of others. Please advise me of who else should be on this list or who shouldn't (it's in no particular order):

---If you want to make a competition out of it, post what percentage of these names you recognize---

Isaac Newton
F.D.R
Julius Caesar
Benjamin Disraeli
Galileo
Archimedes
Euler
Tesla
Augustus Caesar
Louis Riel
Louis Philippe
Louis XIV
Louis XVI
Napoleon
Hitler
Charlemagne
William the Conqueror
Henry V
Henry VIII
George Washington
Kafka
Mussollini
Martin Luther
Martin Luther King Jr.
Robert Frost
Robert Burns
Henry Thoreau
Alexander Pope
Lewis Carol
T.S. Eliot
Mark Twain
Woodrow Wilson
Grover Cleveland
Genghis Khan
James Joyce
Einstein
Rommel
Belisarius
Horace
Cicero
Nero
Stalin
Marx
Thomas Jefferson
Ivan the Terrible
Peter the Great
Catherine the Great
Adam Smith
Allen Dulles
William Donovan
Marie Curie
Joan d'Arc
Florence Nightengale
T.E. Lawrence
P.T. Barnum
Hemingway
Machiavelli
Friedrich Nietzsche
Franz Ferdinand (not the band)
Bismark
Mirabeau
Alexandre Dumas
Jean Jacque Rousseau
Fridtjof Nansen
Shackleton
Edmund Hillary
John Lennon
Jane Austen
Gaius Marius
Sulla
Saladin
Richard the Lionhearted
Marie Antoinette
Zhukov
Abraham Lincoln
Stonewall Jackson
Benjamin Franklin
Hannibal (not Lector)
Hatshepsut
Alexander the Great
Cleopatra
Marc Antony
Ptolemy
Trotsky
Lenin
Lord Admiral Nelson
Theodoric the Goth
Attila the Hun
Casimir Pulaski
Plato
Socrates
Leonardo Da Vinci
Gregor Mendel
Alfred Nobel
Dmitri Mendeleev
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Oliver Cromwell
John Calvin
John Locke
Robespierre
Sir Francis Bacon
Hegel
Immanuel Kant
William Shakespeare
Thomas Aquinas
Copernicus
Mozart
Beethoven
Johannes Kepler
Alfred the Great
Henry of Navarre
Queen Victoria
Oppenheimer
Stephen Hawkings
Nils Bohr
Charles Dickens
Claude Monet
Pablo Picasso
Salvador Dali
Sigmund Freud
Hideki Tojo
Christopher Columbus
Tchaikovsky
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Marco Polo
Nelson Mandela
Rene Descartes
Blaise Pascal
Desmond Tutu
Oscar Wilde
Mao Zedung
Chiang Kai-shek
Che Guevera


EDIT: Looks like the list is fairly complete. Time to hit the library for some books.
 
I see you have Newton and Einstein etc. Need more important scientists/engineers?

Like Gregor Mendel, Alfred Nobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Isambard Kingdom Brunel...
 
What a coincidence, I'm procrastinating too D:

The ones I recognise:

Isaac Newton
Gilgamesh
Julius Caesar
Galileo
Archimedes
Tesla
Augustus Caesar
Louis Philip (sp?)
Louis XIV
Louis XVI
Napoleon
Hitler
William I
Henry V
George Washington
Kafka
Mousellini (sp?) (I think you mean Mussollini)
Martin Luther
Martin Luther King Jr.
T.S. Eliot
Mark Twain
Woodrow Wilson
Genghis Khan
James Joyce
Einstein
Rommel
Belisarius
Cicero
Nero
Stalin
Marx
Thomas Jefferson
Ivan the Terrible
Peter the Great
Catherine the Great
Marie Curie
Joan d'Arc
Florence Nightengale
T.E. Lawrence
Hemmingway
Machiavelli
Friedrich Nietzsche
Franz Ferdinand
Bismark
Alexandre Dumas
Jean Jacque Rousseau
John Lenin
Jane Austen
Richard the Lionhearted
Marie Antoinette
Zhukov
Abraham Lincoln
Stonewall Jackson
Benjamin Franklin
Hannibal (not Lector)
Hatshepsut
Alexander the Great
Cleopatra
Marc Antony
Ptolemy

The rest you posted I haven't ever heard of...
 
now if I was feeling really procrastinateous I would hyperlink each name to their wikipedia entry... but we'll see if I start writing my report before that happens
 
I got 80/97.

It's difficult because some of those seem quite specifically American (eg Stonewall Jackson, Louis Riel). But then I would have included, say, Oliver Cromwell, or Alfred the Great, or Shakespeare, and maybe those aren't so important outside my own country - although I don't see why, say, Hemingway gets on the list and Shakespeare doesn't. :p

And them I'm all like "damn you Mirabeau let Danton and Robespierre get some spotlight."

John Calvin? John Locke? Thomas Aquinas? Jacques Derrida? Hegel even? Robert or Francis Bacon? Copernicus? Goethe? Beethoven and Mozart?
 
I'll always remember Robespierre. Not for his involvement in the French Revolution, but because his name sounds like "Rogue Spear," which is how I would refer to him in my notes during a Western Civ course I took.

Rogue Spear the Incorruptible. What a badass.
 
I still think it's a bit heavy on Western history and short on literature and the arts and any Eastern names other than Genghis Khan
 
I kind of agree. Maybe ask Stern and Crush about painters.

Darkside55 said:
Rogue Spear the Incorruptible. What a badass.
Click to expand...
With your permission that's totally going in my comic. It fits the whole pseudo-anglo-saxon vibe.
 
Picasso fo' sho, da Vinci is already on there, don't know shit about Tolstoy and remain unsure about Orwell/Dickens, although I guess if Hemingway is a prolific enough writer then they fit. But if you include every writer on that stratum of the 'canon' you might have a hell of a long list.

As the list grows it might be as well to stratify it into different sections, except that then you hit a problem with people who are both great writers and great politicians (Benjamin Disraeli), or great artists and great scientists (Da Vinci), or great theologans and great reformists (Martin Luther), and so on.
 
I took out Gilgamesh because most of what we know is more myth than man. Same for a lot of Biblical characters.
 
But how much difference is there between that and the kind of strange hagiography that all historical figures undergo? Not that I want to totally dispute the validity of historical reality (this is what comes of choosing to do english instead of history) but they all operate as a function rather than a person to some extent.

This leaves me quite open to someone coming along and saying that there's no such thing as a person anyway, only functions. WHATEVER.

EDIT: How could I forget Sigmund Freud when he's in me bleedin' avatar?
 
Sulkdodds said:
As the list grows it might be as well to stratify it into different sections
Click to expand...
A Chinese historian during the early Han period named Sima Qian wrote a book called "The Record of the Grand Historian." It was a history book chaptered by topics rather than dates; kings and emperors, literature, philosophy, etc. A similar system would work here.

Sulkdodds said:
With your permission that's totally going in my comic. It fits the whole pseudo-anglo-saxon vibe.
Click to expand...
By my leave. I'm still very anxious to read it.
 
Sulkdodds said:
This leaves me quite open to someone coming along and saying that there's no such thing as a person anyway, only functions. WHATEVER.
Click to expand...

I try to draw the line when I believe that more than half of the information about that person is probably not true or I am not sure if they even existed. ie Cain and Able, Romulus and Remus, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Abraham. Jesus or Moses are borderline.

I just realized that these people can pretty much be summed up as Greek, Roman, German, British, Russian, French, or American, plus a handful of miscellaneous.
 
Darkside55 said:
A Chinese historian during the early Han period named Sima Qian wrote a book called "The Record of the Grand Historian." It was a history book chaptered by topics rather than dates; kings and emperors, literature, philosophy, etc. A similar system would work here.
Click to expand...

What about those extraordinary individuals that transcend the different topics, e.g. da Vinci? Put them in their best one or have their name repeated I guess. Good system.
 
Or have a special catagory for them :)
 
Avoidist said:
What about those extraordinary individuals that transcend the different topics, e.g. da Vinci? Put them in their best one or have their name repeated I guess. Good system.
Click to expand...
Perhaps a section on polymaths, "Renaissance Men" whose names and expertise fall into different categories.
 
Bertrand Russel
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Thomas Henry Huxley
William Wilberforce
Marco Polo
 
Just a few off the top of my head...

Charles Darwin
Wilhelm Eduard Weber
Prokofiev
Tchaikovsky
General Franco
Pinochet
Idi Amin
 
I recognise every name but wasnt sure about the periodic table guy and the japanese PM ..also your link to Robert Burns leads to Robert Frost


also why is Allan Dulles there? he was responsible for orchestrating coups in Iran and Guantemala of democratically elected leaders as well as several assaination attempts and a mind control experiment on unsuspecting US citizens ..ya it sounds crazy but it's not
 
No Darwin on the list?? I assumed he would be which is why i suggested TH Huxley.
 
CptStern said:
also why is Allan Dulles there? he was responsible for orchestrating coups in Iran and Guantemala of democratically elected leaders as well as several assaination attempts and a mind control experiment on unsuspecting US citizens ..ya it sounds crazy but it's not
Click to expand...

But that's fairly important right? I didn't think the list was only for nice historical people. We'd have to remove Genghis otherwise :)
 
Eejit said:
But that's fairly important right? I didn't think the list was only for nice historical people. We'd have to remove Genghis otherwise :)
Click to expand...

ya but he was a bit player at best ..he doesnt live up to the rest of the people on that list
 
Nelson Mandela
Muhammad Ali
Oscar Wilde
Mao Zedung (Or however you want to spell it)


Robert Boyle
Michael Faraday
Johann Dobereiner
Jacobus van't Hoff
Henri Becquerel
Max Planck
Robert Hooke
Ivan Pavlov
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Alexander Fleming
Louis Pasteur
Rene Descartes
Blaise Pascal
John Napier
Gottfried Liebnitz
Paul Dirac
Hippocrates


Lots of scientists and mathematicians!
 
I can list two interesting people, but they're not going to often come up in any conversations. One mathematician (actually a group of mathematicians who published their work under one name) and one philosopher who was a young Hegelian. Obviously most people, myself included, aren't going to understand much of anything Bourbaki published, but reading casually about them is fun and easy.

Nicolas Bourbaki
Max Stirner
 
Don't put Da Vinci down for painting, he was a complete hack at it, the whole reason the last supper is peeling away is because he was clueless when it came to preparing fresco painting. Better to go with Michaelangelo who covered both Painting & Sculpture.

Also a complete lack of architects going on, and too many Americans no one gives a damn about.
 
I added a bunch, any other suggestions? Post a reply if you've actually learned about anything new from this.
 
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