Rank Name Religious Affiliation Influence
1 | Muhammad | Islam | Prophet of Islam; Hart recognized that ranking Muhammad first might be controversial, but felt that, from a secular historian's perspective, this was the correct choice because Muhammad is the only man to have been both a founder of a major world religion and a major military/political leader. |
2 | Isaac Newton | Anglican (rejected Trinitarianism; believed in the Arianism of the Primitive Church) | physicist; theory of universal gravitation; laws of motion |
3 | Jesus Christ | Judaism; Christianity | founder of Christianity |
4 | Buddha | Hinduism; Buddhism | founder of Buddhism |
5 | Confucius | Confucianism | founder of Confucianism |
6 | St. Paul | Judaism; Christianity | proselytizer of Christianity |
7 | Ts'ai Lun | Chinese traditional religion | inventor of paper |
8 | Johann Gutenberg | Catholic | developed movable type; printed Bibles |
9 | Christopher Columbus | Catholic | explorer; led Europe to Americas |
10 | Albert Einstein | Jewish | physicist; relativity; Einsteinian physics |
11 | Louis Pasteur | Catholic | scientist; pasteurization |
12 | Galileo Galilei | Catholic | astronomer; accurately described heliocentric solar system |
13 | Aristotle | Platonism / Greek philosophy | influential Greek philosopher |
14 | Euclid | Platonism / Greek philosophy | mathematician; Euclidian geometry |
15 | Moses | Judaism | major prophet of Judaism |
16 | Charles Darwin | Anglican (nominal) | biologist; described Darwinian evolution, which had theological impact on many religions |
17 | Shih Huang Ti | Chinese traditional religion | Chinese emperor |
18 | Augustus Caesar | Roman state paganism | ruler |
19 | Nicolaus Copernicus | Catholic (priest) | astronomer; taught heliocentricity |
20 | Antoine Laurent Lavoisier | Catholic | father of modern chemistry; philosopher; economist |
21 | Constantine the Great | Roman state paganism; Christianity | Roman emperor who made Christianity the state religion |
22 | James Watt | nonreligious | developed steam engine |
23 | Michael Faraday | Sandemanian | physicist; chemist; discovery of magneto-electricity |
24 | James Clerk Maxwell | Presbyterian; Anglican; Baptist | physicist; electromagnetic spectrum |
25 | Martin Luther | Catholic; Lutheran | founder of Protestantism and Lutheranism |
26 | George Washington | Episcopalian; Deist | first president of United States |
27 | Karl Marx | Jewish; Christian; Atheist; Marxism/Communism | founder of Communism |
28 | Orville and Wilbur Wright | United Brethren | inventors of airplane |
29 | Genghis Khan | Mongolian shamanism | Mongol conqueror |
30 | Adam Smith | Liberal Protestant | economist; expositor of capitalism; religious philosopher |
31 | Edward de Vere a.k.a. "William Shakespeare" | Christianity | literature; also wrote 6 volumes about philosophy and religion |
32 | John Dalton | Quaker | chemist; physicist; atomic theory; law of partial pressures (Dalton's law) |
33 | Alexander the Great | Greek state paganism | conqueror |
34 | Napoleon Bonaparte | Catholic (nominal) | French conqueror |
35 | Thomas Edison | Congregationalist; agnostic | inventor of light bulb, phonograph, etc. |
36 | Antony van Leeuwenhoek | Calvinist | microscopes; studied microscopic life |
37 | William T.G. Morton | ?? | pioneer in anesthesiology |
38 | Guglielmo Marconi | Catholic and Anglican | inventor of radio |
39 | Adolf Hitler | born into but later rejected Catholicism; allegedly a proponent of Germanic Neo-Paganism; Nazism | conqueror; led Axis Powers in WWII |
40 | Plato | Platonism / Greek philosophy | founder of Platonism |
41 | Oliver Cromwell | Puritan (Protestant) | British political and military leader |
42 | Alexander Graham Bell | Unitarian/Universalist | inventor of telephone |
43 | Alexander Fleming | Catholic | penicillin; advances in bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy |
44 | John Locke | raised Puritan (Anglican); Liberal Christian | philosopher and liberal theologian |
45 | Ludwig van Beethoven | Catholic | composer |
46 | Werner Heisenberg | | discovered the principle of uncertainty |
47 | Louis Daguerre | ?? | an inventor/pioneer of photography |
48 | Simon Bolivar | Catholic (nominal); Atheist | National hero of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia |
49 | Rene Descartes | Catholic | Rationalist philosopher and mathematician |
50 | Michelangelo | Catholic | painter; sculptor; architect |
51 | Pope Urban II | Catholic | called for First Crusade |
52 | 'Umar ibn al-Khattab | Islam | Second Caliph; expanded Muslim empire |
53 | Asoka | Buddhism | king of India who converted to and spread Buddhism |
54 | St. Augustine | Christianity | Early Christian theologian |
55 | William Harvey | Anglican (nominal) | described the circulation of blood; wrote Essays on the Generation of Animals, the basis for modern embryology |
56 | Ernest Rutherford | ?? | physicist; pioneer of subatomic physics |
57 | John Calvin | Protestant; Calvinism | Protestant reformer; founder of Calvinism |
58 | Gregor Mendel | Catholic (monk) | Mendelian genetics |
59 | Max Planck | Protestant | physicist; thermodynamics |
60 | Joseph Lister | Quaker | principal discoverer of antiseptics which greatly reduced surgical mortality |
61 | Nikolaus August Otto | ?? | built first four-stroke internal combustion engine |
62 | Francisco Pizarro | Catholic | Spanish conqueror in South America; defeated Incas |
63 | Hernando Cortes | Catholic | conquered Mexico for Spain; through war and introduction of new diseases he largely destroyed Aztec civilization |
64 | Thomas Jefferson | Episcopalian; Deist | 3rd president of United States |
65 | Queen Isabella I | Catholic | Spanish ruler |
66 | Joseph Stalin | Russian Orthodox; Atheist; Marxism | revolutionary and ruler of USSR |
67 | Julius Caesar | Roman state paganism | Roman emperor |
68 | William the Conqueror | Catholic | laid foundation of modern England |
69 | Sigmund Freud | Jewish (non-practicing); Atheist Freudian psychology/psychoanalysis | founder of Freudian school of psychology; psychoanalysis |
70 | Edward Jenner | Christianity | discoverer of the vaccination for smallpox |
71 | Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen | ?? | discovered X-rays |
72 | Johann Sebastian Bach | Lutheran; Catholic | composer |
73 | Lao Tzu | Taoism | founder of Taoism |
74 | Voltaire | raised in Jansenism; later Deist | writer and philosopher; wrote Candide |
75 | Johannes Kepler | Lutheran | astronomer; planetary motions |
76 | Enrico Fermi | Catholic | initiated the atomic age; father of atom bomb |
77 | Leonhard Euler | Calvinist | physicist; mathematician; differential and integral calculus and algebra |
78 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | born Protestant; converted as a teen to Catholic; later Deist | French deistic philosopher and author |
79 | Nicoli Machiavelli | Catholic | wrote The Prince (influential political treatise) |
80 | Thomas Malthus | Anglican (cleric) | economist; wrote Essay on the Principle of Population |
81 | John F. Kennedy | Catholic | president of United States |
82 | Gregory Pincus | Jewish | endocrinologist; developed birth-control pill |
83 | Mani | Manicheanism | founder of Manicheanism, once a world religion which rivaled Christianity in strength |
84 | Lenin | Russian Orthodox; Atheist; Marxism/Communism [more] | Russian ruler |
85 | Sui Wen Ti | Chinese traditional religion | unified China |
86 | Vasco da Gama | Catholic | navigator; discovered route from Europe to India around Cape Hood |
87 | Cyrus the Great | Zoroastrianism | founder of Persian empire |
88 | Peter the Great | Russian Orthodox | forged Russia into a great European nation |
89 | Mao Zedong | Atheist; Communism; Maoism | founder of Maoism, Chinese form of Communism |
90 | Francis Bacon | Anglican | philosopher; delineated inductive scientific method |
91 | Henry Ford | Protestant | developed automobile; achievement in manufacturing and assembly |
92 | Mencius | Confucianism | philosopher; founder of a school of Confucianism |
93 | Zoroaster | Zoroastrianism | founder of Zoroastrianism |
94 | Queen Elizabeth I | Anglican | British monarch; restored Church of England to power after Queen Mary |
95 | Mikhail Gorbachev | Russian Orthodox | Russian premier who helped end Communism in USSR |
96 | Menes | Egyptian paganism | unified Upper and Lower Egypt |
97 | Charlemagne | Catholic | Holy Roman Empire created with his baptism in 800 AD |
98 | Homer | Greek paganism | epic poet |
99 | Justinian I | Catholic | Roman emperor; reconquered Mediterranean empire; accelerated Catholic-Monophysite schism |
100 | Mahavira | Hinduism; Jainism | founder of Jainism |
RU | St. Thomas Aquinas | Catholic | influential early Christian philosopher |
RU | Archimedes | Greek philosophy | father of experimental science |
RU | Charles Babbage | ?? | mathematician and inventor of forerunner of computer |
RU | Cheops | Egyptian paganism | Egyptian ruler; builder of Great Pyramid |
RU | Marie Curie | Catholic; nonreligious | physicist; radioactivity |
RU | Benjamin Franklin | Presbyterian; Deist | American politician and inventor |
RU | Mohandas Gandhi | Hinduism; influenced by Jainism (mother was a Jain) | Indian leader and Hindu religious reformer |
RU | Abraham Lincoln | Regular Baptist (childhood); later ambiguous - Deist, general theist or a very personalized Christianity | 16th president of U.S.; led during Civil War |
RU | Ferdinand Magellan | Catholic | navigator; named Pacific Ocean; first circumnavigation of globe |
RU | Leonardo da Vinci | Catholic | artist; inventor |