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Ten Biggest Thinkers of the 20th Century

I have listed the Thinkers alphabetically and not in order of priority. It was hard enough to limit myself to 10 without also having to rank-order them.

Bugs Bunny

Showing what's possible when the laws of physics don't matter (I should probably have nominated the animation director, Chuck Jones, but I thought that naming the rabbit would be more in the spirit of going beyond the physical world).

Vannevar Bush

Invented the foundation for the Web in 1945 and founded much of the early thinking about human-centered computing.

Winston Churchill

Motivated the British to keep going while the rest of Europe was occupied by Nazis, thus probably saving the world.

Le Corbusier

Promoted functional architecture and the slogan that "a house is a machine for living in."

Albert Einstein

How can you have a list of Big Thinkers without the century's most famous scientist? He was really, really smart.

Sergey Eisenstein

Pioneer of the new narrative language needed for motion pictures. The Web should learn from people like Eisenstein: he didn't just put a camera in the first row of a theater to film a play.

Akira Kurosawa

Created Rashomon - the most famous work of non-linear thinking before the Web.

Ted Nelson

Pioneering and vocal advocate of users' right to simple computers that everybody can figure out and use as a communications medium rather than a glorified calculator.

George Orwell

Maybe the century's most compelling writer, though we still haven't accepted his warnings against the Big Brother society.

Alan Turing

Invented the Turing machine and the Turing test - who else has two of the most important ideas of computer science named after them?

Contrary to most other lists of top-ten this-or-that in the 20th Century, this list is not biased in favor of recent times. In fact, there are more people from before 1950 than from after 1950. This may be because recent contributions have not yet had time to sink in and show their long-term significance.