Thinkers Timeline

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educator. He was one of the most important thinkers in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born on 20 October 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. He studied at the University of Vermont and then earned a PhD in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1884. He taught first at the University of Michigan. In 1894 he moved to the new University of Chicago. In 1896 he founded the Laboratory School there. This was a small school where his new ideas about learning could be tested with real children. During his Chicago years he became close to Jane Addams at Hull House. The two thinkers shaped each other's ideas about democracy. After a dispute with the university, he resigned in 1904. He moved to Columbia University in New York, where he stayed until his retirement in 1930. At Columbia he wrote most of his major books. These included Democracy and Education (1916), Experience and Nature (1925), The Public and Its Problems (1927), and Art as Experience (1934). He travelled widely. He spent more than two years in China (1919-1921), where he gave famous lectures. He also visited Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. In 1937 he led a public inquiry into Stalin's charges against Leon Trotsky. He helped found the NAACP, a major American civil rights organisation. He wrote over forty books and around a thousand articles. He died on 1 June 1952, aged 92.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century. His full name was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, into a small free Black community in the North, and showed exceptional academic ability from childhood. He became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, in 1895, and also studied at the University of Berlin. He spent his long career at the intersection of scholarship and activism, writing groundbreaking works of sociology and history, co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), editing the influential journal The Crisis for many years, and eventually, in his final years, joining the Communist Party of America and emigrating to Ghana, where he died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five, on the eve of the March on Washington. His most important works include The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and The Philadelphia Negro (1899).

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is widely seen as the most influential scientist of the twentieth century. He was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in southern Germany. His family was secular Jewish and middle class. His father ran an electrochemical business that often struggled. His mother was a musician who pushed Albert to play the violin from age five. He had one younger sister, Maja. As a child, he was shy and slow to speak, but fascinated by science. A compass given to him at age five made him wonder about invisible forces. He found regular school dull. At sixteen he ran away from his German school. He finished his education in Switzerland and entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1896. He graduated in 1900. He could not find a teaching post and took a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. There, in his spare time, he produced his most famous work. In 1905, his 'miracle year', he published four papers that changed physics: on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equation E=mc². Fame followed slowly. He held professorships in Zurich, Prague, and Berlin. In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. In 1933, the Nazis came to power. Einstein, who was Jewish, was already in the United States and never returned to Germany. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked until his death on 18 April 1955, aged 76.

Chester Irving Barnard (1886-1961) was an American business executive whose book The Functions of the Executive (1938) became one of the foundational works of mid-twentieth-century organisational theory, produced by a practising businessman rather than by an academic. He was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to a family of modest means. His mother died when he was five; he was raised partly by grandparents. He attended Mount Hermon School, working to support himself, then won a scholarship to Harvard University in 1906, where he studied economics and philosophy. He left Harvard in 1909 without completing his degree, having refused to take a required laboratory course, and joined the American Telephone and Telegraph Company as a statistician. He stayed with AT&T or its subsidiaries for most of his working life. He rose to become president of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company in 1927 and held that position until 1948. He combined his business career with substantial reading in philosophy, sociology, and psychology, drawing on thinkers from Vilfredo Pareto to Alfred North Whitehead. In the 1930s he was invited to give a series of lectures at Harvard, which became The Functions of the Executive. He also served on many public bodies — the United Service Organizations during the Second World War (he was its president from 1942 to 1945), the Rockefeller Foundation (president 1948-1952), the National Science Foundation (chairman 1952-1954), and various advisory committees. He wrote a second book, Organization and Management (1948), and many articles. He was awarded honorary degrees by several universities but never held an academic position. He died in New York in 1961 at seventy-five. His work combined the authority of long practical experience with unusually wide reading, producing a synthesis that academics found intellectually serious and practitioners found grounded in reality.

T.S. Eliot was a poet and critic. His full name was Thomas Stearns Eliot. He is seen as one of the most important poets in English of the twentieth century. He was born in 1888 in St Louis, in the United States. He died in 1965 in London. Eliot came from a well-off American family. He studied at Harvard University and then in Europe. As a young man he settled in England, and he later became a British citizen. He spent the rest of his life there. Eliot did not begin as a full-time writer. For years he worked at a bank in London, writing poetry in his spare time. Later he became an editor at a publishing house, where he helped many other writers. His most famous poem is 'The Waste Land', published in 1922. It is a difficult, broken poem about a damaged world after the First World War. It made him famous. Later he wrote 'Four Quartets', a long, calmer poem about time and faith. Eliot also wrote important essays about poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His first marriage was very unhappy and painful for both people. In his later years he found more peace, partly through his religious faith and a happy second marriage.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an African American anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist, one of the most significant figures in both the Harlem Renaissance and the history of American anthropology. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, but grew up in Eatonville, Florida — one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States — an experience that would shape everything she wrote and thought. She studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Barnard College and Columbia University, becoming one of the very few Black women to enter the discipline in that era. Boas recognised her exceptional gifts, particularly her ability to collect folklore from communities that would not have opened to a white researcher. She conducted fieldwork across the American South, the Caribbean, and Central America, collecting African American folklore, Hoodoo practices, and Caribbean religious traditions. She wrote four novels, most famously Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), two books of folklore, an autobiography, and numerous essays. She died in poverty and obscurity in 1960 and was buried in an unmarked grave. She was recovered for a wide readership by Alice Walker, who found and marked her grave in 1973 and wrote about her in a celebrated essay.

Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975) was an African American chemist whose pioneering synthesis of plant-derived steroids made cortisone and other hormone-based medicines widely available for the first time. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, the grandson of former slaves. Alabama's public schools did not offer education beyond the eighth grade to Black children at the time, but his parents — a railway mail clerk and a teacher — insisted on his further education. He entered DePauw University in Indiana as what the institution called a sub-freshman, taking high school classes alongside his college studies, and graduated as valedictorian in 1920. American graduate programmes in chemistry were largely closed to Black students; he was refused admission at several top universities and taught for several years at historically Black colleges before winning a fellowship for graduate work at Harvard. Harvard gave him a master's degree but denied him the chance to teach or to complete a doctorate because of his race. He eventually earned his doctorate in Vienna in 1931, one of the few options then available. In 1935 he completed the total synthesis of the alkaloid physostigmine, used to treat glaucoma, beating a competing English group. Unable to get university chemistry positions because of his race, he joined the Glidden Company, a paint manufacturer, where he led research that developed industrial methods for producing steroids from soybean oil — processes that made cortisone affordable to patients with rheumatoid arthritis and opened the way to a generation of hormone-based medicines. He later founded his own company. He and his family faced racist violence in the Chicago suburb where they bought a house in 1950, including attempts to burn and bomb their home. He died in 1975. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973, the second African American so honoured.

William Edwards Deming (1900-1993) was an American statistician and management consultant whose work on quality control and systematic thinking about production reshaped manufacturing in Japan after the Second World War and, later, in the United States. He was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and grew up in a small town in Wyoming under difficult family circumstances. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Wyoming, earned a master's degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Colorado, and completed a PhD in mathematical physics at Yale in 1928. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture and then the Census Bureau, where he applied statistical methods to sampling and the design of surveys. In 1947 he was invited to help prepare the Japanese census and returned to Japan in the early 1950s at the invitation of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers. His lectures on statistical quality control and his broader management philosophy were widely adopted by Japanese industry, where he became a famous and revered figure decades before his ideas were taken seriously in his own country. The Deming Prize, established in Japan in 1951 and still awarded annually, recognised his influence. In the United States his work was largely ignored until a 1980 NBC documentary, If Japan Can, Why Can't We, brought him to public attention at the age of eighty. He spent his final thirteen years teaching, consulting, and writing; his major book Out of the Crisis appeared in 1982. He continued leading seminars until shortly before his death in 1993, aged ninety-three.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who became the most publicly prominent and widely read anthropologist of the twentieth century. She was born in Philadelphia and studied at Barnard College before completing her doctorate under Franz Boas at Columbia University. In 1925, at the age of twenty-three, she travelled to American Samoa to conduct fieldwork on adolescence — a period of turmoil in Western culture that many assumed was biologically inevitable. She wanted to test whether this turmoil was universal or culturally specific. Her book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) argued that adolescence in Samoa was a calm and untroubled transition, suggesting that the storm and stress of Western adolescence was a product of culture, not biology. The book became an international sensation. She went on to conduct fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Bali, and elsewhere, writing influential books on gender, temperament, and culture. She was also a tireless public intellectual, writing a column for Redbook magazine for many years and testifying before Congress on issues from nuclear weapons to environmental policy. She was married three times, all to fellow anthropologists, and her personal life was characterised by the same willingness to challenge convention that marked her intellectual work. She died in 1978.

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and United States Navy rear admiral whose work on programming languages and compilers helped turn computing from a specialist craft into a discipline ordinary people could enter. She was born in New York City to a family that encouraged her scientific curiosity from childhood — at seven, she took apart seven alarm clocks to see how they worked. She studied mathematics and physics at Vassar College and earned a doctorate in mathematics from Yale in 1934, an unusual achievement for a woman of her era. She taught mathematics at Vassar until the United States entered the Second World War. In 1943, at thirty-seven, she joined the Naval Reserve and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard, where she became one of the first programmers of the Mark I, one of the earliest large electromechanical computers. After the war she moved into private industry, joining Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and later Remington Rand and Sperry. At these companies she developed the first practical compiler, a program that translates human-readable instructions into machine code, and led the team that created FLOW-MATIC, a predecessor of COBOL. She was recalled to naval service several times and finally retired from the Navy as a rear admiral at seventy-nine, the oldest officer in active service at the time. She continued to lecture widely until her death in 1992.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-American political philosopher. She was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Germany, and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 she fled Germany, was briefly interned in France, and eventually reached the United States in 1941, where she spent the rest of her life. Her experience as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany shaped all of her thinking: she wanted to understand how the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, had been possible, and what they revealed about the fragility of political freedom and human dignity. Her most important books are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). She was a professor at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York. She died in 1975, mid-sentence at her typewriter, working on her final book.

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He is widely considered the greatest logician of the 20th century. His incompleteness theorems changed how mathematicians and philosophers understand the foundations of mathematics. He was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Brno in the Czech Republic). His parents were ethnic Germans living in a mostly Czech city. His father managed a textile factory. The family was comfortable. Young Kurt was a quiet, curious child. He asked so many questions that his family nicknamed him 'Mr. Why'. He suffered through a serious illness with rheumatic fever at age six, which he believed had permanently damaged his heart, even though doctors found no lasting damage. The belief shaped his fearful approach to his own health for the rest of his life. He studied at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. He attended the famous Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met to discuss the foundations of knowledge. He earned his doctorate in mathematics in 1929. The next year, he proved his most famous result, the incompleteness theorems. He was 24. In the 1930s, the rise of Nazism made Vienna dangerous. Gödel was not Jewish but had Jewish friends and colleagues. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 and the start of World War II, he and his wife Adele fled to America. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein also worked. The two became close friends. Gödel did important later work in cosmology and philosophy. He died in 1978 of malnutrition. He had become so paranoid about poisoning that he stopped eating after his wife was hospitalised.

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist. She was born in rural Pennsylvania and developed a love of the natural world from childhood, spending hours outdoors observing the life around her family's farm. She studied biology at Johns Hopkins University, where she was one of very few women in the sciences, and worked as a marine biologist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service for many years. She was also a gifted writer who published three acclaimed books about the sea before Silent Spring. In 1962 she published Silent Spring, a carefully researched and beautifully written account of how synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT, were accumulating through food chains and destroying bird populations, insect communities, and entire ecosystems. The book was met with a massive campaign of attack from the chemical industry, which attempted to discredit both her science and her personally, including attacks on her as a hysterical woman and a communist. She died of breast cancer in 1964, two years after the book's publication, never knowing the full extent of its influence. Silent Spring is widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement and leading to the banning of DDT in the United States and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist. He was born into a poor Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn, New York, and described his childhood as lonely and unhappy. He studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin and spent most of his career at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He became one of the founders of humanistic psychology: a movement that argued that psychology should study not only mental illness and dysfunction but also human health, creativity, and the capacity for a full and meaningful life. He is best known for the hierarchy of needs, a model of human motivation that organises human needs from the most basic physical requirements for survival up to the need for self-actualisation: the full development of a person's potential. This model has been extraordinarily influential in psychology, education, management, and development. He died in 1970 still working on his ideas, convinced that he had only begun to understand human potential.

John Kenneth Galbraith was an economist and writer. He was born in 1908 on a farm in Ontario, Canada, and died in 2006. He later became an American citizen and spent most of his career in the United States. Galbraith studied agricultural economics before moving into wider economic questions. He taught for many years at Harvard University. He was unusually tall, around two metres, and had a sharp, witty writing style that made his books bestsellers far beyond economics. Galbraith did not stay only in the university. During the Second World War he helped run price controls for the United States government, holding down prices to stop wartime inflation. Later he advised several Democratic presidents. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy made him United States ambassador to India, a country Galbraith came to know and admire. His most famous books appeared in the 1950s and 1960s. 'The Affluent Society' (1958) and 'The New Industrial State' (1967) reached huge audiences. In them Galbraith argued that modern economics had not kept up with how rich societies actually worked. Galbraith was a public figure as much as a scholar. He believed economists should write for ordinary citizens, not just for each other, and he did so for over fifty years.

Thurgood Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and the first Black Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He spent his life using the law to dismantle racial segregation in America. He was born Thoroughgood Marshall on 2 July 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland. He shortened the name to Thurgood at age six because his classmates teased him about it. His father William was a railroad porter; his mother Norma was a school teacher. As a teenager Marshall got into trouble at school. As punishment he was made to read the United States Constitution. The exercise changed his life. He saw clearly the gap between the Constitution's promises of equality and the racist 'Jim Crow' laws that ruled the American South. He wanted to study law at the University of Maryland, the public university of his home state. He was rejected because he was Black. He went instead to Howard University, a historically Black school in Washington, D.C. He graduated first in his class in 1933. His main mentor at Howard was Charles Hamilton Houston, who taught his students that law could be used as a tool for social change. In 1936 Marshall joined the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He became its chief lawyer. From 1940 he led the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Over twenty-five years he argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29. He won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. President Lyndon Johnson nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1967. He served for 24 years. He retired in 1991 and died on 24 January 1993, aged 84.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909-2005) was an Austrian-American writer and teacher whose books and articles over seven decades shaped the practice of management and helped establish it as a distinct field of study. He was born in Vienna in 1909 to an educated middle-class family — his father a senior civil servant, his mother one of the first women to study medicine in Austria. The Drucker home was a meeting place for intellectuals, and the young Peter grew up among people like the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He studied law in Hamburg and Frankfurt, earned a doctorate in international law in 1931, and worked briefly as a financial journalist. The rise of Nazism drove him out of Germany in 1933; he moved first to London, then in 1937 to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1939 book The End of Economic Man analysed the rise of fascism. In 1943 General Motors invited him to spend two years studying the company, producing Concept of the Corporation in 1946, one of the first serious studies of how a large modern business actually works. Over the following decades he wrote thirty-nine books and hundreds of articles covering management, innovation, the non-profit sector, economics, and the rise of the knowledge worker. He taught at New York University and for most of his later career at the Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its management school after him. He advised corporations, governments, non-profits, and religious organisations. He died in Claremont in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.

Milton Friedman was an American economist. He was born in New York City in 1912 and died in 2006. His parents were poor immigrants from Eastern Europe. He was the first person in his family to go to university. Friedman studied economics during the Great Depression, a time of mass unemployment in the 1930s. He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, from 1946 onwards. The group of economists there became known as the 'Chicago School', and Friedman was its most famous member. Friedman was both a serious academic and a public figure. As an academic, he did careful statistical work on money, prices, and spending. In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. But he was also a skilled communicator. He wrote a popular book, 'Capitalism and Freedom', and later made a television series called 'Free to Choose' that was watched by millions. He became the best-known voice arguing for free markets and a smaller role for government. His ideas influenced political leaders in the 1980s, especially in the United States and Britain. He also advised governments in other countries, including Chile, which later drew strong criticism. Friedman was admired and attacked in roughly equal measure. Few economists of the twentieth century were as influential, and few were as fiercely debated.

Claude Shannon was an American mathematician and engineer. He invented the field of information theory. His work made the digital age possible. Almost every technology that uses digital signals (mobile phones, the internet, computers, GPS, streaming, modern medical imaging) depends on ideas Shannon developed in the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, and grew up in the small town of Gaylord. His father was a small-town judge. His mother was a language teacher and school principal. Shannon was a clever, curious child. He built his own telegraph as a teenager, using barbed wire fences to connect with a friend's house. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1936. He went to MIT for graduate work. His 1937 master's thesis, written when he was 21, applied Boolean logic (a form of mathematical logic developed in the 19th century) to electrical circuits. The work showed that any logical operation could be performed by appropriate combinations of switches. The thesis has been called the most important master's thesis of the 20th century. It became the foundation for designing all digital computer hardware. During the Second World War, Shannon worked on cryptography (the science of codes) at Bell Laboratories. He met the British codebreaker Alan Turing during the war. The two men had lunch together regularly when Turing visited the United States. After the war, Shannon stayed at Bell Labs. In 1948, he published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, the founding paper of information theory. He was 32. He continued working at Bell Labs and later at MIT until he developed Alzheimer's disease in the 1990s. He died in 2001.

Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician. She did the calculations that helped send the first American astronauts into space and to the Moon. She worked at NASA for over 30 years. She was a Black woman in a field that was largely white and male. Her work was central to the success of the early American space programme. She was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Her birth name was Katherine Coleman. From a young age, she loved counting. She counted everything: steps, dishes, the stars. She was so advanced that she finished primary school by age 10. The local town did not have a high school for Black children. Her father moved the family 200 kilometres so that Katherine and her siblings could attend a school that did. She went on to West Virginia State, a historically Black college, and graduated with degrees in mathematics and French at 18. In 1953 she joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which became NASA in 1958. She was hired as a 'human computer'. Before electronic computers were trusted, dozens of women did mathematical calculations by hand. Black women at NACA were segregated from white women. They worked in a separate building with separate bathrooms. Johnson pushed past these limits. She joined the all-male Flight Research Division. She did calculations for the first American manned space flights. In 1962, before John Glenn orbited Earth, he asked specifically for Johnson to verify the computer's calculations by hand. He trusted her over the machine. She continued at NASA until 1986. She lived to be 101, dying in 2020.

John Rawls (1921-2002) was an American political philosopher, widely regarded as the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and studied at Princeton University. He served in the Pacific during the Second World War, an experience that shook his earlier religious faith and deepened his concern with questions of justice: he witnessed the bombing of Hiroshima from close range and refused a commission that would have required him to participate in such actions again. He spent most of his academic career at Harvard University, where he taught from 1962 until his retirement. His major work, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, transformed academic political philosophy and became one of the most discussed books of the century. In it he developed a systematic theory of justice grounded in the idea of a social contract among free and equal citizens choosing principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. His later work, Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1999), developed and revised his ideas in response to criticism. He died in 2002.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was an American historian, playwright, and activist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents who worked in factories, and grew up in poverty during the Great Depression. He served as a bombardier in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War, an experience that turned him against the use of mass violence in war. After the war he studied history at Columbia University under the GI Bill and became a professor. He taught at Spelman College, a historically Black women's college in Atlanta, where he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, before moving to Boston University. In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, which retold American history from the perspectives of indigenous people, enslaved Africans, women, immigrants, and working people rather than from the perspective of political and military leaders. The book has sold over two million copies and has been continuously in print. He was also a prominent anti-war activist, opposing American involvement in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War. He died in 2010 at the age of eighty-seven.

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) was an American philosopher and historian of science. He studied physics at Harvard University and then became interested in the history of science: how scientific ideas had actually developed over time, rather than how scientists described the process. What he found surprised him. Science did not progress smoothly by adding new facts one by one. Instead, it went through long periods of normal work, interrupted by sudden, dramatic changes when the whole way of thinking about a subject was replaced. He described this in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. It became one of the most widely read and discussed books in the history of science. Kuhn spent his career at universities including Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His ideas changed not only how people think about science but how they think about knowledge and change in many other fields too.

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and activist. He was born in Harlem, New York, the eldest of nine children. His mother's partner, David Baldwin, a storefront preacher, was a powerful and terrifying figure in his childhood, and the tensions between religious passion and the world's brutality run through all of Baldwin's work. He grew up in poverty in Harlem during the Depression, was a gifted student who discovered books and libraries as a way out of the world around him, and became a junior preacher at fourteen. By seventeen he had left the church, though its language and rhythms never left his writing. In 1948, at twenty-four, he left the United States for Paris, driven away by the daily humiliations and the constant threat of racial violence. He spent much of his adult life in France but never stopped writing about and returning to America. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953, and was followed by Giovanni's Room, Another Country, and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, among others. His essay collections — Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, and No Name in the Street — are among the most important works of American prose in the twentieth century. He died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France in 1987.

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was an American cultural anthropologist and one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. He was born in San Francisco and served in the US Navy during the Second World War before studying at Antioch College and Harvard, where he received his PhD in 1956. He conducted fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco — societies that became the material for his most important work. He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago and then at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked from 1970 until his death. His most important works include The Religion of Java (1960), Agricultural Involution (1963), The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (1980), and Local Knowledge (1983). He was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000 for Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. He died in 2006.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was an American poet, memoirist, essayist, and public figure whose seven-volume autobiography and body of poetry made her one of the most widely read writers of the twentieth century. She was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St Louis, Missouri. After her parents' marriage ended, she and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their grandmother in the segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. At seven, during a visit to her mother, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend; after testifying against him, she stopped speaking for nearly five years. She returned to Stamps and, under the patient attention of a neighbour who introduced her to literature, gradually found her voice again. She left school at sixteen, became San Francisco's first Black streetcar conductor, and gave birth to her son Guy that same year. Over the following decades she worked as a singer, dancer, actor, journalist, activist, and eventually writer. She lived in Ghana in the 1960s and worked closely with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr in the American civil rights movement. In 1969 she published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first volume of her autobiography, which became one of the most widely taught books in American schools and has been translated into many languages. She published six further autobiographical volumes, ten books of poetry, essays, plays, and children's books. She recited her poem On the Pulse of Morning at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, the first inaugural poem in over thirty years. She taught for decades at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and died there in 2014, aged eighty-six.

Fazlur Rahman Khan (1929-1982) was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer whose innovations transformed how tall buildings are designed and made the modern generation of skyscrapers possible. He was born in Dhaka, then part of British India and later the capital of Bangladesh, to a family of educators. His father was a mathematics teacher who later became director of public instruction for East Bengal. Khan studied civil engineering at the Bengal Engineering College in Calcutta and at Dhaka University. In 1952 he travelled to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, earning two master's degrees and a doctorate at the University of Illinois by 1955. He joined the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, where he spent his entire career and became a partner in 1966. Working closely with architects including Bruce Graham, he designed two of the most important skyscrapers of the twentieth century: the John Hancock Center, completed in 1969, and the Sears Tower, completed in 1973 and the world's tallest building for twenty-five years. He also designed Hajj Terminal at Jeddah airport, one of the largest fabric roof structures in the world. He died of a heart attack in Saudi Arabia in 1982, at only fifty-three. His tubular design systems and his broader philosophy of structural efficiency have become the foundation on which nearly every tall building built since has been constructed.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She is one of the most important writers of science fiction and fantasy in any language. She was born on 21 October 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were unusual. Her father, Alfred Kroeber, was a famous anthropologist who had studied the native peoples of California. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber, was a writer who later produced Ishi in Two Worlds, a book about the last survivor of a California tribe. Their home was full of books, Indigenous friends, and long conversations about other cultures. This upbringing shaped everything Le Guin later wrote. She studied at Radcliffe College and at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in French and Italian Renaissance literature. In 1953, travelling by ship to France on a Fulbright scholarship, she met the historian Charles Le Guin. They married and eventually settled in Portland, Oregon, where they raised three children. She lived in Portland for most of her life. She began publishing fiction in the early 1960s. Her breakthrough came with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a fantasy novel about a young wizard. It has never gone out of print. The following year, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagined a world where people are neither male nor female most of the time. The Dispossessed (1974) imagined an anarchist society on a moon, seen in dialogue with a capitalist society on the planet it orbits. These three books alone would have made her a major writer. She wrote more than twenty novels, many stories, essays, and poems over six decades. She also translated. Her English version of the Daodejing, the ancient Chinese Daoist text, was published in 1997 and is one of the most admired. She died on 22 January 2018 in Portland, aged 88. She had been writing almost until the end.

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was an American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. She was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, into a Black working-class family with deep roots in African American storytelling traditions. She studied at Howard University and Cornell, and worked for many years as an editor at Random House, where she championed and shaped major works of African American literature. She began writing fiction in her thirties, while raising two children alone after her marriage ended. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She went on to write ten novels in all, each one formally adventurous and morally demanding. Beloved (1987), her most celebrated work, is based on the true story of an enslaved woman who killed her daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. Song of Solomon, Sula, Jazz, and Paradise each explore different dimensions of Black American life and history with extraordinary formal invention. She also wrote important critical essays, most notably Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which examined how African American presence had shaped and was systematically ignored in American literature. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. She died in 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was an American political economist. She was born in Los Angeles and grew up during the Great Depression, a period of severe economic hardship in the United States. She studied political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and spent most of her career at Indiana University, where she co-founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. In 2009 she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. She received it for her work on how communities manage shared resources: things like forests, fisheries, water systems, and grazing land that many people depend on and that can be damaged if anyone takes too much. The standard economic view was that shared resources would always be destroyed by overuse, the so-called tragedy of the commons. Ostrom showed, through decades of careful fieldwork and research across many countries, that this was wrong. Communities around the world had developed their own rules and institutions for managing shared resources sustainably, without privatisation and without government control. She died in 2012, still working.

Nina Simone was an American singer, pianist, and songwriter. Her real name was Eunice Kathleen Waymon. She was born in 1933 in the small town of Tryon, North Carolina, in the southern United States. She was the sixth of eight children in a poor Black family. She was a gifted musician from very early childhood. She could play piano by ear before she was three. She started playing in church and quickly showed serious talent. White and Black neighbours raised money to pay for her piano lessons. Her dream was to become the first major Black classical concert pianist in America. She studied for a year at the Juilliard School in New York. She then applied to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She was rejected. She always believed the rejection was because of her race. The disappointment shaped her life. To make money, she began singing and playing in nightclubs. She took the stage name Nina Simone partly so her religious mother would not know what she was doing. Her first album came out in 1958. By the early 1960s she was famous. She mixed jazz, classical, blues, gospel, folk, and African music. As the civil rights movement grew, she became one of its most powerful musical voices. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, she grew more bitter and politically angry. She left the United States in the 1970s and lived in many countries. She struggled with mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, throughout her later life. She died in France in 2003.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and Supreme Court Justice. She is widely seen as one of the most important legal advocates for gender equality in modern history. She was born Joan Ruth Bader on 15 March 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. Her family was Jewish, with roots in Eastern Europe. They were not wealthy. Her mother Celia died of cancer the day before Ruth's high school graduation. She studied at Cornell University, where she met Martin Ginsburg. They married in 1954. The marriage lasted 56 years. Marty Ginsburg was an extraordinary support to her career. He was a tax lawyer, a brilliant cook, and her closest friend. Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine women in a class of over 500 men. She transferred to Columbia Law School to be with Marty in New York and graduated joint top of her class. Despite her record, she could not find a Supreme Court clerkship. Law firms often refused to hire her. She was, she later said, 'a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot'. She became a law professor at Rutgers, then Columbia. In 1972 she co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As its head she argued six cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. President Carter appointed her to a federal appeals court in 1980. President Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court in 1993. She served there for 27 years until her death from pancreatic cancer on 18 September 2020, aged 87. She was the second woman ever to serve on the Court.

Vine Deloria Jr. was a Native American scholar, writer, and activist. He was the most influential Native American intellectual of the 20th century. His books changed how Native Americans were studied in universities and how Native communities thought about themselves. He was born in 1933 in Martin, South Dakota. He came from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The Sioux are also known by their own names, including Lakota and Dakota. His family had a long history of leadership. His grandfather was a Yankton Sioux man named Tipi Sapa. His father, Vine Deloria Sr., was an Episcopal priest, one of the first Native American priests in that church. His aunt was the writer and historian Ella Deloria. The family combined deep involvement in the Christian church with deep loyalty to Sioux traditions. The combination shaped Vine Jr.'s thinking. He studied at Iowa State University and then at the Lutheran School of Theology in Illinois. He earned a master's degree in theology in 1963. He also earned a law degree in 1970. He served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1964 to 1967, the major political organisation for Native nations. His first book, Custer Died for Your Sins, came out in 1969. It was an angry, funny, wide-ranging attack on how white America treated Native Americans. It became a major bestseller. He went on to write more than 20 books on law, religion, science, and history. He taught at several universities, ending at the University of Colorado. He died of cancer in 2005, aged 72. His son Philip Deloria is also a leading scholar.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and political activist whose work insisted on the interconnection of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the analysis of power. She was born Audrey Geraldine Lorde in New York City to parents who had emigrated from Grenada in the Caribbean. She dropped the y from her name as a child, preferring the symmetry of Audre Lorde. She grew up in Harlem during the Depression, attended Hunter College and Columbia University, and worked as a librarian while beginning to publish her poetry. Her first book of poems appeared in 1968. She went on to publish ten further poetry collections, three prose books including the autobiographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and a large body of essays and speeches gathered in Sister Outsider and other volumes. She taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi and later held a long professorship in English at Hunter College in New York. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978 and wrote The Cancer Journals, one of the first serious public accounts of the experience. She lived for a period in the Caribbean island of St Croix, where she continued her writing and political organising. She died of liver cancer in 1992, aged fifty-eight. She described herself, in a phrase that became famous, as a Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet — refusing to be reduced to any single part of that identity.

Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic, public intellectual, and music critic. He was one of the founders of postcolonial studies. He was born on 1 November 1935 in Jerusalem, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. His family was Palestinian Christian. His father was a successful businessman with American citizenship. The family lived between Jerusalem and Cairo. In 1948, the State of Israel was created and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced. Said's family lost their home in Jerusalem. He was 12. The family settled in Cairo, where he attended British and American schools. At 15, he was sent to boarding school in the United States. He studied at Princeton and then at Harvard, where he earned his PhD in English literature in 1964. He taught at Columbia University in New York for most of his career, from 1963 until his death. His early work was on European literature, especially Joseph Conrad. In 1978 he published Orientalism, the book that changed his life and founded a new field of study. It argued that Western scholarship about the Middle East had created a false and damaging image of the region. He was also a vocal advocate for Palestinian rights. He served for fourteen years on the Palestinian National Council. He wrote about music as a critic and was an accomplished pianist. With the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, he co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings young Arab and Israeli musicians together. He died of leukaemia on 25 September 2003 in New York, aged 67.

Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) was an American biologist and theorist. She was born Lynn Alexander in Chicago, graduated from the University of Chicago at eighteen, and went on to earn a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. She spent most of her academic career at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In the 1960s, while still in her twenties, she developed her theory of serial endosymbiosis: the argument that the complex cells found in animals, plants, and fungi, called eukaryotic cells, evolved through a process in which smaller bacteria were incorporated into, and eventually became permanent parts of, larger cells. The mitochondria that produce energy in animal cells, and the chloroplasts that perform photosynthesis in plant cells, were originally free-living bacteria that were engulfed by larger cells and eventually became unable to live independently. This theory, which fundamentally changed how biologists understood the evolution of complex life, was rejected fifteen times before it was finally published in 1967. She also co-developed the Gaia hypothesis with the chemist James Lovelock, arguing that the Earth's biological and physical systems interact as a self-regulating whole. She died in 2011 from a stroke.

Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad (1941-2010) was an Indian-American management scholar whose ideas about corporate strategy, core competence, and the business opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid transformed how companies and development thinkers approached both strategy and poverty. He was born in Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, the son of a judge and a civil servant. He studied physics at Loyola College, Madras, and worked for four years in an Indian branch of Union Carbide, the American chemical company, before entering the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. In 1972 he travelled to the United States for doctoral work at Harvard Business School, completing his thesis in 1975. He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in 1977 and remained there for the rest of his career. His 1990 Harvard Business Review article with Gary Hamel, The Core Competence of the Corporation, became one of the most-cited business articles ever written and reshaped strategic thinking through the 1990s. His later work took him in a different direction. His 2002 article and 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid argued that the world's poorest four billion people represented not only a moral claim on international attention but also a significant market that could be served profitably if products and business models were designed appropriately. The book reached business schools, development agencies, and corporations. He continued publishing influential work until his death, wrote regularly for Indian newspapers on the country's development, and mentored a generation of scholars and practitioners. He died in San Diego in 2010 at the age of sixty-eight.

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was a Congolese philosopher, novelist, and linguist. He was one of the most important African thinkers of the late 20th century. He was born in 1941 in Likasi, in what was then the Belgian Congo. His family was Catholic and he was educated in Catholic schools. As a young man, he entered a Benedictine monastery in Rwanda and considered becoming a monk. He left the monastery after a few years but remained interested in religion throughout his life. He studied Romance philology and philosophy, gaining a doctorate from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium in 1970. He returned to Congo and taught at universities there. In 1979, he left Congo for the United States, unable to continue working under the Mobutu dictatorship. He taught at Haverford College, then at Duke University, then at Stanford. He wrote in French and English. His academic writing was deep and difficult. He also wrote novels and poetry that many readers found more accessible. His most famous book is The Invention of Africa, published in 1988. It changed how scholars think about African studies. He followed it with The Idea of Africa in 1994 and many other books and essays. He retired from Duke University in 2014. He died on 21 April 2025, aged 83, in North Carolina. His death was widely mourned across the African intellectual community.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a Chicana cultural theorist, poet, and writer. She was born in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas into a family of farmworkers, descendants of both the indigenous peoples of the region and the Spanish colonisers, who had been living on the Texas-Mexico border since before Texas became part of the United States. She grew up between English and Spanish, between Mexican and American cultures, between indigenous and Catholic traditions, and between the rural world of agricultural labour and the academic world she eventually entered. She studied at the University of Texas at Pan American, then at the University of Texas at Austin, and later at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her doctoral work. She is best known for Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a groundbreaking work that mixes prose and poetry, Spanish and English, theory and autobiography to develop her philosophy of borderlands consciousness. She also co-edited This Bridge Called My Back (1981), a landmark anthology of writings by women of colour that helped define the field of women of colour feminism. She died in 2004 from complications of diabetes.

Walter Rodney (1942-1980) was a Guyanese historian, political thinker, and activist. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana, then a British colony in South America, and showed exceptional academic ability from childhood. He studied history at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and then completed a doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He taught at universities in Tanzania and Jamaica and became one of the most important historians of Africa and the African diaspora of his generation. He is best known for his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, which showed systematically how African countries were made poor through centuries of colonial exploitation, not left poor through a lack of development. He was deeply committed to organising alongside working people and poor communities, not only writing about them. He was banned from Jamaica in 1968 for his political activities. He returned to Guyana in 1974 to work for political change there and was assassinated in 1980 at the age of thirty-eight. He died just months before elections that might have changed Guyanese politics.

María Lugones (1944-2020) was an Argentine-American philosopher. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and moved to the United States as a young woman, where she completed her doctorate in philosophy and spent her career teaching at Binghamton University in New York. She was a feminist philosopher, a Latina scholar, and a community activist who worked extensively with migrant and indigenous communities in the American Southwest. She is best known for two connected contributions to philosophy. The first is her concept of world-travelling: the practice of genuinely entering another person's world to see reality as they see it, which she proposed as the foundation of a loving and just way of relating across difference. The second is her concept of the coloniality of gender: the argument that the gender system as it now exists across most of the world was imposed through colonialism, and that many indigenous and non-Western communities had very different and often more complex and flexible understandings of gender before colonial contact. She died in 2020, widely recognised as one of the most important feminist philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Judith Heumann was an American disability rights activist. She is often called 'the mother of the disability rights movement'. She was born on 18 December 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Werner and Ilse Heumann, were German Jewish immigrants. Many of their relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. The family later moved to Brooklyn, New York. When Judy was 18 months old, she got polio. This was during a large outbreak of the disease in the United States. A machine helped her breathe for three months. When she recovered, she could not walk. She used a wheelchair for the rest of her life. At age five, the principal of her local school refused to let her attend. He called her a 'fire hazard'. Her mother fought this. Eventually Judy got an education, partly in special classes and partly in a public high school. She went to Long Island University, where she began organising other disabled students. In her twenties, she applied to become a teacher in New York City. The Board of Education passed her written and oral exams but failed her medical exam because she used a wheelchair. In 1970, she sued them. The judge, Constance Baker Motley (the first Black woman federal judge), made it clear the Board would lose. They settled. Heumann became the first wheelchair user to teach in the state of New York. She taught for three years. She became one of the main leaders of the American disability rights movement. In April 1977, she led a 26-day sit-in at a federal building in San Francisco. The sit-in forced the US government to implement Section 504, the first major US disability civil rights law. She later worked for both the Clinton and Obama administrations. She wrote her memoir Being Heumann in 2020. She died on 4 March 2023 in Washington D.C., aged 75. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) both owe much to her work.

Tony Judt was a British-American historian. He was one of the most important historians of postwar Europe and a sharp public intellectual. His massive 2005 book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 is widely considered one of the great works of modern historical writing. He was born in 1948 in London. He died in 2010 in New York, aged 62, from complications of motor neurone disease. He came from a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe. His parents were secular socialists. He grew up in north London. He studied history at King's College Cambridge from 1966. He spent time in Israel as a young man, where he worked on a kibbutz and briefly served in the Israeli army during the 1967 Six-Day War. The experience shaped him deeply. He returned home increasingly critical of Israeli policies, while remaining deeply engaged with Jewish history and identity. He earned his PhD in 1972. He taught at Cambridge and Oxford, then moved to the United States in 1987. He became professor of European history at New York University, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1995 he founded the Remarque Institute at NYU for the study of Europe. He wrote across many fields: French intellectual history, postwar European history, contemporary politics, and questions of social democracy and political memory. He was politically a social democrat. He criticised both the radical left and the contemporary right. Some of his views, especially his strong criticism of Israeli policies and his 2003 essay calling for a binational state in Israel-Palestine, made him controversial. In 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also called ALS. The disease gradually paralysed him while leaving his mind intact. He continued writing through dictation. His final books, written as he was dying, are some of his most powerful. He died in 2010.

Christopher Hitchens was a British-American journalist, essayist, and writer. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He wrote about politics, literature, religion, and many other subjects. He was known for sharp arguments, beautiful prose, and a willingness to take unpopular positions. He was born in 1949 in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. He came from a middle-class British military family. His father was a navy officer. His mother was Jewish, though he only learned this as an adult. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford from 1967. He was active in left-wing student politics. After university he became a journalist. He wrote for left-wing magazines including the New Statesman. In 1981 he moved to the United States. He wrote a regular column for The Nation, a major American left-wing magazine, for nearly 20 years. He became an American citizen in 2007. He wrote for many other publications including Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and Slate. He was prolific. He wrote 17 books and thousands of articles. For most of his career, he was on the political left. He was a friend of writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, his politics shifted. He supported the Iraq war in 2003. Many of his old left-wing friends saw this as betrayal. He defended his position fiercely. In 2007 he published God Is Not Great, an aggressive attack on religion. The book made him one of the New Atheists alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2010. He continued writing about his illness with extraordinary honesty. He died in December 2011, aged 62.

bell hooks (1952–2021) was an American educator, professor, feminist theorist, and cultural critic. She was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, into a working-class Black family in the American South, and chose her pen name — deliberately written in lowercase — to honour her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks and to signal that it was the ideas that mattered, not the person behind them. She taught at several universities including Yale, Oberlin, and City College of New York, and wrote more than thirty books across education, feminism, race, love, and culture. She was one of the most widely read and accessible public intellectuals of her generation, equally at home in academic conferences and community conversations. She died in Berea, Kentucky, in December 2021.

Cornel West is an American philosopher, theologian, and public intellectual. He was born in 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up in a Black Baptist family in Sacramento, California. His father was a civilian air force administrator. His mother was a teacher and later a school principal. The Black Baptist church shaped him deeply from childhood. He has often said that his thinking grew out of three traditions: the Black church, the Black freedom struggle, and the love of music, especially jazz and the blues. West entered Harvard at sixteen and graduated in three years. He went on to do an MA and PhD in philosophy at Princeton, finishing in 1980. His teachers there included the philosopher Richard Rorty, who shaped his interest in American pragmatism. After Princeton he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, then Yale, then Princeton, then Harvard, then Princeton again, then Harvard again, and is now back at Union Theological Seminary as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair. He has written more than twenty books. The best known is Race Matters (1993), a bestseller about race, democracy, and inequality in America. Democracy Matters (2004) followed. He has been a constant public presence on television, radio, and stages around the world, mixing philosophy with political activism. He has been arrested in protests for civil rights and against war. In 2024 he ran for president of the United States as an independent candidate. He continues to teach, write, and speak today.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) is an American botanist, ecologist, and writer who is a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, one of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes region of North America. She grew up in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State and has described how questions about plants and the natural world led her to science and to her own Indigenous heritage in equal measure. She studied botany and ecology, earned a doctoral degree, and became a professor of environmental biology at the State University of New York. She founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which works to bring together Indigenous knowledge and Western science in the service of ecological restoration. She is best known for her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013), which has become one of the most widely read books about the natural world in recent years. In it she weaves together scientific ecology and Potawatomi traditional knowledge to argue for a fundamentally different relationship between human beings and the living world.

Jeffrey Sachs is an American economist. He was born in 1954 in Detroit, in the United States. He studied economics at Harvard University, where he was a brilliant student. He became a full professor at Harvard while still very young. Sachs is known for working in the real world, not only in the university. From early in his career, he advised governments. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he gave advice to countries trying to change from communist or crisis-hit economies to market economies. These included Bolivia, Poland, and Russia. This advice was bold, fast, and very controversial. Later, Sachs turned his focus to global poverty. He moved to Columbia University in New York. He became a leading voice arguing that extreme poverty could be ended, and soon. He advised the United Nations and helped shape major global anti-poverty goals. He also led a large project called the Millennium Villages. It tried to lift specific African villages out of poverty, using many kinds of help at once. Sachs has written bestselling books, including 'The End of Poverty'. He is a famous, energetic, and divisive figure. Some see him as a tireless campaigner against poverty. Others sharply criticise his methods and results.

Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi (born 1955) is an Indian-American businesswoman and former chief executive of PepsiCo, one of the world's largest food and beverage companies. She was born in Madras (now Chennai) to a Tamil Brahmin family and grew up in a middle-class household where education was valued intensely. Her mother regularly asked her daughters at dinner to explain what they would do as president or prime minister, a practice Nooyi later credited with shaping her ambition. She studied physics, chemistry, and mathematics at Madras Christian College, earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta, and won a scholarship to Yale School of Management, where she completed a second master's degree in 1980. She worked at the Boston Consulting Group, Motorola, and Asea Brown Boveri before joining PepsiCo in 1994. She rose through corporate strategy and finance roles, led the spin-off of PepsiCo's restaurant businesses (Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell) into Yum Brands, and led the acquisition of Tropicana and Quaker Oats. She became chief financial officer in 2001, president and CFO in 2006, and chief executive officer and chairman in 2006 — the first woman of colour to lead a Fortune 50 company. During her twelve years as CEO, PepsiCo's revenue grew from forty-four to sixty-four billion dollars. She led a strategic reorientation she called Performance with Purpose, shifting the company's portfolio toward healthier products while maintaining profitability. She retired as CEO in 2018 and as chairman in 2019. She has since served on the boards of Amazon, the International Cricket Council, and the World Economic Forum, co-led a New York State commission on reopening during the Covid pandemic, and published her 2021 memoir My Life in Full. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, Raj, and their two daughters.

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist. They are one of the most influential thinkers in the humanities in recent decades. They were born on 24 February 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio, into a Jewish family of Hungarian and Russian descent. Their parents were active in the synagogue. Several of their mother's relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. This family history of persecution shaped Butler's later concerns with violence, grief, and vulnerable lives. As a teenager, Butler started studying philosophy in a special class at their synagogue. This was in part a punishment for disruptive behaviour. The class, taught by a rabbi, introduced them to Jewish ethics and philosophical questions. They later studied philosophy at Bennington College and Yale, where they completed a PhD in 1984 on Hegel's influence on 20th-century French thought. They have taught at several universities, including Johns Hopkins, and since 1993 at the University of California, Berkeley. Their 1990 book Gender Trouble changed how scholars think about gender. It made Butler famous and controversial. They have since written many books, including Bodies That Matter (1993), Precarious Life (2004), Frames of War (2009), and Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024). Butler is also known for their public writing on politics, including on Israel and Palestine, the war on terror, and recent global movements against queer and trans people. They identify as non-binary and use they/them pronouns. They are still active, writing and teaching in 2026.

Harriet McBryde Johnson was an American lawyer, writer, and disability rights activist. She was one of the sharpest writers on disability in English. She was born on 8 July 1957 in Laurinburg, North Carolina. Both her parents were college teachers. She was one of five children. A sister also had the same progressive neuromuscular disease that Harriet herself lived with. The disease affected her muscles throughout her life. From an early age, she used a motorised wheelchair. She needed help with many daily tasks. She was an activist from her teens. As a young student, she tried to get an abusive teacher fired. She later described this as the start of her 'hell-raising'. She studied history at Charleston Southern University, earned a master's degree in public administration, and then a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1985. She lived most of her life in Charleston, South Carolina. As a lawyer, she specialised in helping poor disabled clients claim Social Security benefits. This was quiet, unglamorous work. It kept her close to the realities of disabled lives most people ignored. She was also active in politics, serving as chair of the Charleston County Democratic Party. She described herself, with her usual humour, as 'a disabled, liberal, atheistic Democrat' and as 'a bedpan crip'. She became nationally famous in 2003 when The New York Times Magazine published her essay 'Unspeakable Conversations'. It described her debate the year before with the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that parents should be allowed to kill severely disabled babies. The essay was sharp, funny, and serious. It made her one of the most important voices in American disability thought. She later wrote a memoir, Too Late to Die Young (2005), and a novel for young adults, Accidents of Nature (2006). She died on 4 June 2008, aged 50.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American legal scholar and civil rights lawyer. She is one of the most influential thinkers on race, gender, and the law in the past fifty years. She was born on 5 May 1959 in Canton, Ohio. Her parents were both educated and active in local politics. This family background shaped her strong interest in civil rights from an early age. She studied at Cornell University, where she earned a degree in government and Africana studies in 1981. She then went to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1984. At Harvard she and other students pushed the school to hire more professors of colour and to offer more classes on race and law. She then earned a Master of Laws at the University of Wisconsin in 1985 and worked for a Wisconsin Supreme Court judge. In 1986, at age 27, she joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Law. She has taught there ever since. Since 1995, she has also held a position at Columbia Law School in New York. She now splits her time between the two coasts. In a 1989 article, she introduced the word 'intersectionality'. This simple word has spread across universities, courtrooms, and activist movements around the world. She is also one of the founders of critical race theory, a field that studies how law and race shape each other. In 1996 she co-founded the African American Policy Forum. In 2014 she launched the #SayHerName campaign. She is still active today as a scholar, teacher, podcaster, and public speaker.

Paul Farmer (1959-2022) was an American physician, anthropologist, and global health activist. He was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, and grew up in modest and at times difficult circumstances, living for a period on a bus and then on a boat in Florida with his large family. He studied anthropology and medicine at Harvard University. In 1983, while still a student, he began working in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and never stopped. He co-founded Partners in Health in 1987, an organisation that has built health systems in Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Liberia, Mexico, Peru, Kazakhstan, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere, demonstrating that high-quality healthcare could be delivered to the poorest communities on earth. He was a professor at Harvard Medical School, spent much of his time in Haiti, and travelled constantly between his field work, his Harvard obligations, and advocacy in international health policy. He died in his sleep in Rwanda in 2022 at the age of sixty-two, after a lifetime of working eighteen-hour days while sleeping in basic conditions and eating simply to remain as close as possible to the people he served.

Rigoberta Menchú Tum (born 1959) is an indigenous Maya K'iche' woman from Guatemala and one of the most important human rights activists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She was born in the village of Chimel in the northwestern highlands of Guatemala, the sixth of nine children of a poor farming family. Her father, Vicente Menchú, was a community organiser who had been involved in land rights struggles against wealthy landowners. Her family and community were caught up in the brutal counterinsurgency campaign conducted by the Guatemalan military against indigenous and rural communities in the late 1970s and early 1980s, part of a civil war that lasted thirty-six years and resulted in the killing of over two hundred thousand people, the vast majority indigenous Maya. Her brother Petrocinio was tortured and killed by the military in 1979. Her father was killed in the burning of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City in 1980, an event orchestrated by the military. Her mother was kidnapped, tortured, and killed in 1980. Menchú herself went into exile in Mexico, where she dictated her testimony to the Venezuelan anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, which was published as I, Rigoberta Menchú in 1983. She has been a continuous advocate for indigenous rights and human rights. She received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas.

Mariana Mazzucato is an economist. She was born in Rome, Italy, in 1968. Her father was a physicist, and when she was a child the family moved to the United States, where her father worked at Princeton University. She grew up mostly in the United States and later returned to Europe. She holds both Italian and American citizenship. Mazzucato studied history and international relations as an undergraduate, then moved into economics for her doctorate. Today she is a professor at University College London, in Britain, where she founded a research centre called the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. She became widely known in 2013 with her book 'The Entrepreneurial State'. It argued that governments, not just private companies, are major drivers of new technology. Later books include 'The Value of Everything' (2018), 'Mission Economy' (2021), and 'The Big Con' (2023). Mazzucato is unusual among economists for her direct influence on real policy. She has advised governments and international bodies around the world, including in Britain, Italy, South Africa, and the European Union, and she works with the United Nations and other organisations. She is also a strong communicator who reaches a wide public. As a living, working economist, her ideas are still developing and are actively debated.

Timothy Snyder is an American historian. He is one of the most influential contemporary historians of Eastern Europe and 20th-century atrocity. He has also become a major public voice warning about threats to democracy in the United States and elsewhere. He was born in 1969 in Centerville, Ohio, in the American Midwest. He has spent most of his career as a professor at Yale University. He came from a non-academic family. His father was a veterinarian. He showed academic talent young. He studied history at Brown University, then at Oxford, where he earned his doctorate in 1997. His doctoral work was on Eastern European nationalism. He learned Polish, Ukrainian, German, French, Russian, Czech, Belarusian, and other languages over time. The linguistic range gave him access to sources most American historians cannot read directly. He joined the Yale faculty in 2001. His early academic books were specialised studies of Eastern European political history. They included The Reconstruction of Nations (2003) on Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Lithuanian national identities, and Sketches from a Secret War (2005) on a Polish-Soviet conflict. In 2010 he published Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The book became a major international bestseller. It tells the story of the killings carried out by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia between 1933 and 1945 in the lands between Berlin and Moscow. About 14 million civilians were killed in this region by the two regimes. The book brought together histories that had usually been told separately. Since 2017, Snyder has become a leading public voice warning about threats to democracy. His 2017 short book On Tyranny became a global bestseller. He has spoken extensively about Russian aggression in Ukraine and about authoritarian movements in the United States and elsewhere. He continues teaching at Yale.

Esther Duflo is a French-American economist. In 2019 she became, at age 46, the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. She was also only the second woman ever to win it. She was born on 25 October 1972 in Paris, France. Her mother was a paediatrician who travelled to countries like Rwanda and Haiti as a doctor for child victims of war and poverty. Her father was a professor of mathematics. Her mother often returned with stories of suffering children. These stories shaped Esther deeply. She was a strong student. She studied history and economics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She spent a year teaching in Moscow, where she also studied Russia's economic reforms. After a master's degree in Paris, she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States for her doctorate in economics. She earned her PhD in 1999. MIT hired her at once. In 2003, with her colleagues Abhijit Banerjee and Sendhil Mullainathan, she co-founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL. The lab's mission was to use scientific experiments to test which anti-poverty programs actually work. J-PAL has grown into a global research network. By 2020, more than 400 million people had been affected by programs the lab has tested. She married Abhijit Banerjee in 2015. They share two children. They also shared the 2019 Nobel Prize. She is now President of the Paris School of Economics in addition to her MIT professorship. She is one of the most influential economists in the world.

Alice Wong was an American disability activist, writer, and editor. She founded the Disability Visibility Project, which gathered and amplified the stories of disabled people across the United States. She was born on 27 March 1974 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her parents had immigrated from Hong Kong. Alice was their eldest daughter. She had a genetic neuromuscular condition from childhood. Over her life, her muscles grew weaker. She used a powered wheelchair and, in her later years, a device to help her breathe. She described herself sometimes as a 'cyborg', reclaiming the machines that kept her alive as part of her identity rather than a sad necessity. She studied English and sociology at Indiana University and later earned a master's in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco. She lived in San Francisco for most of her adult life. She worked at UCSF as a research associate for over ten years, studying health care for disabled people. In 2013, President Obama appointed her to the National Council on Disability, a federal body that advises the US government. In 2015, she took part in a White House ceremony for the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. She attended through a telepresence robot, one of the first public figures to do so. Obama waved at her robot on camera. In 2014 she founded the Disability Visibility Project with StoryCorps, a non-profit oral history group. Over the following decade she built a huge body of work: anthologies of disabled writers, podcasts, campaigns, and a memoir called Year of the Tiger (2022). In 2024, the MacArthur Foundation named her one of their fellows, an award often called a 'genius grant'. She died in a San Francisco hospital from an infection on 14 November 2025, aged 51.

Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician. She was the first woman ever to win the Fields Medal, the highest prize in mathematics. She was born in 1977 in Tehran, the capital of Iran. She grew up during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a difficult time for the country. Her parents encouraged her education despite the surrounding chaos. She was not interested in mathematics as a young child. She wanted to be a writer. She read novels constantly and dreamed of becoming a novelist. Her interest in maths grew slowly through middle school. By high school she was attending a special school for gifted girls in Tehran. She and her best friend Roya Beheshti became famous for being the first Iranian girls to win medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Mirzakhani won gold medals in 1994 and 1995, with a perfect score the second year. She studied mathematics at Sharif University in Tehran. In 1999 she went to the United States for graduate school at Harvard. She was supervised by Curtis McMullen, a Fields Medallist himself. Her doctoral work was already remarkable. She found new ways to count certain kinds of curves on curved surfaces. She continued at Princeton and then at Stanford as a professor. In 2014, aged 37, she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal. The medal is awarded only every four years and only to mathematicians under 40. The same year she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer eventually spread to her bones and liver. She died in 2017, aged just 40. She left behind her husband and her young daughter Anahita.

Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-American computer scientist. She is one of the most important researchers in the field of AI ethics. Her work has shown how artificial intelligence systems can encode and amplify racial bias, gender bias, and other forms of harm. She was born in 1982 or 1983 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She came to the United States as a teenage refugee. Her family fled Ethiopia after political violence affected her brothers. She arrived in the US in 2001 and faced typical refugee challenges. She did her undergraduate work at Stanford University in electrical engineering. She earned a PhD at the Stanford AI Lab in 2017, studying under the leading computer vision researcher Fei-Fei Li. Her doctoral work used Google Street View images to predict demographic and political patterns from cars in different neighbourhoods. The research drew attention. After her PhD, she did postdoctoral work at Microsoft Research, then joined Google in 2018. She co-led Google's Ethical AI team alongside Margaret Mitchell. In 2020, Gebru and her colleagues drafted a research paper about the risks of large language models, then a new technology. The paper, often called the Stochastic Parrots paper, argued that very large AI language systems carried serious risks. Google ordered her to retract the paper or remove her name. She refused. Google fired her, though Google described the departure differently. The firing caused a major public controversy. Many researchers signed petitions in her support. Several Google researchers later resigned in protest. In 2021 she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent research lab focused on AI ethics. She has continued speaking publicly about harms in AI systems. She has become one of the most visible critics of how the technology industry develops AI.