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George Washington

1399 George Washington was a Founding Father and the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. As commander of the Continental Army, Washington led Patriot forces to victory in the...

Abraham Lincoln

1037 Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States, serving from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. He led the United States through the American Civil War, defeating the Confederate...

Thomas Jefferson

803 Thomas Jefferson was an American Founding Father and the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was a leading...

Andrew Jackson

718 Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. He rose to fame as a U.S. Army general and served in both houses of the U.S. Congress. His political philosophy, which...

Benjamin Franklin

716 Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath: a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. Among the most influential intellectuals of his time,...

Woodrow Wilson

709 Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only Democrat to serve as president during the Progressive Era, when Republicans dominated the...

James Madison

659 James Madison was an American statesman, diplomat, and Founding Father who served as the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. Madison was popularly acclaimed as the "Father of the...

Alexander Hamilton

639 Alexander Hamilton was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first U.S. secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795 under the presidency of George Washington....

John Adams

636 John Adams was a Founding Father and the second president of the United States from 1797 to 1801. Before his presidency, he was a leader of the American Revolution that achieved independence from...

William Clark

613 William Clark was an American explorer, soldier, Indian agent, and territorial governor. A native of Virginia, he grew up in pre-statehood Kentucky before later settling in what became the state of...

Martin Van Buren

582 Martin Van Buren was the 8th president of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. He founded the Democratic Party with Andrew Jackson and became his vice president in 1833. Under Jackson, he...

Zachary Taylor

572 Zachary Taylor was an American military officer and politician who was the 12th president of the United States, serving from 1849 until his death in 1850. Taylor was a career officer in the United...

Jefferson Davis

547 Jefferson F. Davis was the only president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865, leading the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Before the war, he was a member of the Democratic Party...

Ulysses S. Grant

541 Ulysses S. Grant was the 18th president of the United States, serving from 1869 to 1877. He previously led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War in 1865 as commanding general.

Lyndon B. Johnson

540 Lyndon Baines Johnson, also known as LBJ, was the 36th president of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. He became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, under whom he had...

William Henry Harrison

519 William Henry Harrison was the ninth president of the United States, serving from March 4 to April 4, 1841, the shortest presidency in U.S. history. He was also the first U.S. president to die in...

Warren G. Harding

517 Warren Gamaliel Harding was the 29th president of the United States, serving from 1921 until his death in 1923. A member of the Republican Party, he was one of the most popular presidents at the time...

James Monroe

494 James Monroe was an American Founding Father who served as the fifth president of the United States from 1817 to 1825. He was the last Founding Father to serve as president as well as the last...

Franklin D. Roosevelt

437 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, also known as FDR, was the 32nd president of the US, serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving US president and the only one to have served more...

Francis Lewis

435 Francis Lewis was an American merchant and a Founding Father of the United States. He was a signatory of the United States Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation as a...

Bill Clinton

429 William Jefferson Clinton is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the...

Grover Cleveland

395 Stephen Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, serving from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. He was the first U.S. president to serve nonconsecutive terms and the...

Winfield Scott

395 Winfield Scott was an American military commander and a presidential candidate. He served as Commanding General of the United States Army from 1841 to 1861, and was a veteran of the War of 1812,...

Stephen A. Douglas

383 Stephen Arnold Douglas was an American politician and lawyer from Illinois. As a U.S. senator, he was one of two nominees of the divided Democratic Party to run for president in the 1860 presidential...

Richard Russell Jr.

381 Richard Brevard Russell Jr. was an American politician. A Southern Democrat, he served as the 66th Governor of Georgia from 1931 to 1933 before serving in the United States Senate for almost 40...

Nathaniel Hawthorne

367 Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.

William Tecumseh Sherman

363 William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861–1865), earning recognition for his...

Chester A. Arthur

357 Chester Alan Arthur was the 21st president of the United States, serving from 1881 to 1885. He was a Republican from New York who previously served as the 20th vice president under President James A....

James A. Garfield

338 James Abram Garfield was the 20th president of the United States, serving from March 1881 until his death in September that year after being shot in July. A preacher, lawyer, and Civil War general,...

Matthew C. Perry

317 Matthew Calbraith Perry was a United States Navy officer who commanded ships in several wars, including the War of 1812 and the Mexican–American War. He led the Perry Expedition that ended Japan's...

Henry Hudson

305 Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator during the early 17th century, best known for his explorations of present-day Canada and parts of the Northeastern United States.

Noah Webster

296 Noah Webster was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and...

Richard Montgomery

284 Richard Montgomery was an Irish-born American army officer. First serving in the British Army, he later became a major general in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. On 31...

Jackie Robinson

281 Jack Roosevelt Robinson was an American professional baseball player who was the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era. Robinson broke the color line when he...

Andrew Johnson

279 Andrew Johnson was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. The 16th vice president, he assumed the presidency following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson was a...

Alexander Graham Bell

267 Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone...

Seneca the Younger

262 Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, a dramatist, and in one work, a satirist, from the post-Augustan age of...

Philip Sheridan

261 Philip Henry Sheridan was a career United States Army officer and a Union general in the American Civil War. His career was noted for his rapid rise to major general and his close association with...

John F. Kennedy

258 John Fitzgerald Kennedy, also known as JFK, was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person elected president, at 43 years,...

John Tyler

257 John Tyler was the tenth president of the United States, serving from 1841 to 1845, after briefly holding office as the tenth vice president in 1841. He was elected vice president on the 1840 Whig...

Oliver Evans

255 Oliver Evans was an American inventor, engineer, and businessman born in rural Delaware and later rooted commercially in Philadelphia. He was one of the first Americans to build steam engines and...

Franklin Pierce

246 Franklin Pierce was the 14th president of the United States, serving from 1853 to 1857. A northern Democrat who believed that the abolitionist movement was a fundamental threat to national unity, he...

John Harvard

245 John Harvard (1607–1638) was an English Puritan minister in colonial New England whose deathbed bequest to the "schoale or colledge" founded two years earlier by the Massachusetts Bay Colony was so...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

238 Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th...

Jimmy Carter

236 James Earl Carter Jr. was an American politician and humanitarian who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, Carter served from 1971 to...

Robert Fulton

235 Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the world's first commercially successful steamboat, the North River Steamboat. In 1807, that steamboat...

Wright brothers

229 The Wright brothers, Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, were American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful airplane. They made the...

Eli Whitney

223 Eli Whitney Jr. was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin in 1793, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South....

Christopher Columbus

218 Christopher Columbus was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Genoa who completed four Spanish-based voyages across the Atlantic Ocean sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs, opening...

William McKinley

214 William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. A member of the Republican Party, he led a realignment that made Republicans largely...

Rutherford B. Hayes

213 Rutherford Birchard Hayes was the 19th president of the United States, serving from 1877 to 1881. He served as Cincinnati's city solicitor from 1858 to 1861 and was known as a staunch abolitionist...

Martin Luther King Jr.

208 Martin Luther King Jr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister who was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He advanced civil...

Euclid

204 Euclid was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the Elements treatise, which established the foundations of...

Gerald Ford

203 Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. was the 38th president of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977. A member of the Republican Party, Ford assumed the presidency after the resignation of Richard Nixon,...

Frederick Douglass

200 Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.

Isaac Newton

191 Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath who was a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, author and inventor. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the...

Calvin Coolidge

168 Calvin Coolidge was the 30th president of the United States, serving from 1923 to 1929. A Republican lawyer from Massachusetts, he previously served as the 29th vice president from 1921 to 1923,...

John Milton

163 John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, and civil servant. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost was written in blank verse and included 12 books, written in a time of immense religious flux and...

William Howard Taft

162 William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States from 1909 to 1913 and the tenth chief justice of the United States from 1921 to 1930. He is the only person to have held both offices.

Winston Churchill

155 Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from...

James Clerk Maxwell

150 James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, which was the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism...

Langston Hughes

147 James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. An early innovator of jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of...

Johnny Carson

138 John William Carson was an American television host, comedian, and writer best known as the host of NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962–1992).

James Buchanan

136 James Buchanan Jr. was the 15th president of the United States, serving from 1857 to 1861. He also served as the 17th United States secretary of state from 1845 to 1849 and represented Pennsylvania...

Neil Armstrong

135 Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who, as the commander of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator,...

James K. Polk

133 James Knox Polk was the 11th president of the United States, serving from 1845 to 1849. A protégé of Andrew Jackson and a member of the Democratic Party, he was an advocate of American expansionism...

John the Apostle

133 John the Apostle, also known as Saint John the Beloved and, in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Saint John the Theologian, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament....

Millard Fillmore

118 Millard Fillmore was the 13th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853. He was the last president to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House, and the last to be...

Herbert Hoover

117 Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st president of the United States, serving from 1929 to 1933. A wealthy mining engineer before his presidency, Hoover led the wartime Commission for Relief in Belgium...

George W. Bush

116 George Walker Bush is an American politician, businessman, and former U.S. Air Force officer who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party...

Samuel Morse

115 Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor and painter. After establishing his reputation as a portrait painter, Morse, in his middle age, contributed to the invention of a single-wire...

Thomas Edison

113 Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, which...

Douglas MacArthur

109 Douglas MacArthur was an American general who served as a top commander during World War II and the Korean War, achieving the rank of General of the Army. He served with distinction in World War I;...

Lord Byron

106 George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was a British poet. He was one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest British poets. Among his best-known...

James the Great

102 James the Great was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus. According to the New Testament, he was the second of the apostles to die, after Judas Iscariot, and the first to be martyred. Saint James is...

Andrew the Apostle

101 Andrew the Apostle was an apostle of Jesus. According to the New Testament, he was a fisherman and one of the Twelve Apostles chosen by Jesus.

Paul the Apostle

99 Paul, commonly known as Paul the Apostle or Saint Paul, was a Christian apostle who spread the teachings of Jesus in the first-century AD. For his contributions towards the New Testament, he is...

Francis of Assisi

97 Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, known as Francis of Assisi, was an Italian mystic, poet and Catholic friar who founded the religious order of the Franciscans. Inspired to lead a Christian life of...

Alexander Fleming

91 Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain "for the discovery of penicillin and its...

Joe Louis

90 Joseph Louis Barrow was an American professional boxer who competed from 1934 to 1951. Nicknamed "the Brown Bomber", Louis is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential boxers of all...

Dwight D. Eisenhower

90 Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961. Earlier, during World War II, he became a General of the Army, and was Supreme Commander of the...

Harry S. Truman

87 Harry S. Truman was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. As the 34th vice president in 1945, he assumed the presidency upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt that...

John Browning

82 John Moses Browning was an American firearm designer who developed many varieties of military and civilian firearms, cartridges, and gun mechanisms, many of which are still in use around the world....

Saint Joseph

79 According to the canonical Gospels, Joseph was a 1st-century Jewish man of Nazareth who was married to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and was the legal father of Jesus.

Charles Lindbergh

74 Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, military officer, and author. On May 20–21, 1927, he made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris, a distance of 3,600 miles (5,800 km),...

Harriet Tubman

70 Harriet Tubman was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends,...

Benjamin Dearborn

69 Benjamin Dearborn (1754–1838) was an American printer and mechanical inventor in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Boston, Massachusetts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His inventions include...

Roland

66 Roland was a Frankish military leader under Charlemagne who became an epic hero and one of the principal figures in the literary cycle known as the Matter of France. The historical Roland was...

Arthur Compton

66 Arthur Holly Compton was an American physicist who shared the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics with C. T. R. Wilson for his discovery of the Compton effect, which demonstrated the particle nature of...

Ronald Reagan

65 Ronald Wilson Reagan was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. A member of the Republican Party, he became an important figure in...

W. E. B. Du Bois

65 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, writer, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively...

Homer

61 Homer was an ancient Greek poet who is widely credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Although his life and...

Richard Nixon

61 Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he represented California in both houses of the...

Ernest Hemingway

60 Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized...

Lancelot

56 Lancelot du Lac, alternatively written as Launcelot and other variants, is a popular character in the Arthurian legend's chivalric romance tradition. He is typically depicted as King Arthur's close...

Louis IX of France

56 Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis, was King of France from 1226 until his death in 1270. He is widely recognized as the most distinguished of the Direct Capetians. Following the death of his...

Cyrus McCormick

56 Cyrus Hall McCormick was an American inventor and businessman who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, which became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902. Originally from...

Ella Fitzgerald

55 Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American singer, songwriter and composer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone,...

Sybilla Righton Masters

53 Sybilla Righton Masters was an American inventor. Masters was the first person residing in the American colonies to be given an English patent, and possibly the first known female machinery inventor...

Samuel Colt

51 Samuel Colt was an American inventor, industrialist, and businessman who established Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company and made the mass production of revolvers commercially viable.

William Faulkner

50 William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he...

Alexander von Humboldt

50 Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian...

Hannah Slater

50 Hannah Slater was an early American inventor. Some sources state that she was the first American woman to receive a patent, however others state that Hazel Irwin, who received a patent for a cheese...

Saint George

48 Saint George, also George of Lydda, was an early Christian martyr who is venerated as a saint in Christianity. According to holy tradition, he was a soldier in the Roman army. Of Cappadocian Greek...

Charles Dickens

47 Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and journalist. He created some of literature's best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian...

Cornelius Atherton

42 Cornelius Atherton, was an iron manufacturer, an inventor and an active gunmaker for patriot causes during the American Revolutionary War. He invented a process for making what was known as "American...

Lawrence Bragg

42 Sir William Lawrence Bragg was an Australian-born British X-ray crystallographer who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his father William Henry Bragg – the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their...

Margaret Thatcher

41 Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She...

Thomas the Apostle

40 Thomas the Apostle also known as Didymus, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament. Thomas is commonly known as "doubting Thomas" because he initially doubted the...

Simón Bolívar

37 Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco was a Venezuelan military officer and statesman who led what are currently the countries of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador,...

Mark the Evangelist

37 Mark the Evangelist, also known as John Mark or Saint Mark, was a Libyan who is traditionally ascribed to be the author of the Gospel of Mark. Most modern scholars agree that the Gospel of Mark is...

Saint Lawrence

33 Saint Lawrence or Laurence was one of the seven deacons of the city of Rome under Pope Sixtus II who were martyred in the persecution of the Christians that the Roman emperor Valerian ordered in 258.

Robert H. Goddard

33 Robert Hutchings Goddard was an American physicist, inventor, and engineer credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, which was successfully launched on March 16,...

Anthony of Padua

32 Anthony of Padua, OFM, or Anthony of Lisbon; born Fernando Martins de Bulhões was a Portuguese Catholic priest and member of the Order of Friars Minor.

Virgil

31 Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the...

Charles Darwin

31 Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a...

Napoleon

30 Napoleon I was Emperor of the French from 18 May 1804 until his first abdication in 1814, with a brief restoration during the Hundred Days in 1815. He rose to prominence as a general during the...

William Shakespeare

29 William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's...

Michael (archangel)

28 Michael, also called Archangel Michael or Michael the Taxiarch, is an archangel and the warrior of God in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam while additionally being a saint in Christianity. The...

Leonardo da Vinci

28 Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame...

Dante Alighieri

26 Dante Alighieri, widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is...

Brigid of Kildare

25 Saint Brigid of Kildare or Saint Brigid of Ireland is the patroness saint of Ireland, and one of its three national saints along with Patrick and Columba. According to medieval Irish hagiographies,...

Victor Hugo

25 Victor-Marie Hugo, vicomte Hugo was a French Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, journalist, human rights activist and politician.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

24 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a Classical composer and musician. In his brief life, he completed more than 800 works including outstanding examples of most of the genres of his time: symphonies,...

Friedrich Schiller

24 Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German playwright, poet, philosopher and historian. Schiller is considered to be one of Germany's most important classical playwrights.

Alexandre Dumas

23 Alexandre Dumas, also known as Alexandre Dumas père, was a French novelist and playwright.         

Ferdinand Magellan

22 Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer best known for planning and leading the 1519–22 Spanish expedition to the East Indies. During this expedition, he discovered the Strait of Magellan,...

Guglielmo Marconi

22 Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquess, was an Italian radio-frequency engineer, inventor, and politician known for his creation of a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system....

Lajos Kossuth

21 Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva was a Hungarian nobleman, lawyer, journalist, politician, statesman, revolutionist and governor-president of the Hungarian State during the war of independence...

Moctezuma II

21 Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, retroactively referred to in European sources as Moctezuma II, and often simply called Montezuma, was the ninth emperor of the Aztec Empire, reigning from 1502 or 1503 to 1520....

Johann Sebastian Bach

21 Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety of instruments and forms, including the orchestral...

Hans Geiger

21 Johannes Wilhelm "Hans" Geiger was a German experimental physicist. He is known as the inventor of the Geiger counter, a device used to detect ionizing radiation, and for carrying out the Rutherford...

Luke the Evangelist

20 Luke the Evangelist was one of the Four Evangelists—the four traditionally ascribed authors of the canonical gospels. The Early Church Fathers ascribed to him authorship of both the Gospel of Luke...

Michael Faraday

20 Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist who contributed vastly to the study of electrochemistry and electromagnetism. His main discoveries include the principles underlying...

Raphael

20 Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, now generally known in English as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition,...

Pablo Picasso

20 Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century,...

Thomas Gainsborough

19 Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of...

James Watt

19 James Watt was a Scottish inventor, engineer and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought...

Claude Monet

19 Oscar-Claude Monet was a French painter and founder of Impressionism who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long...

Voltaire

18 François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher (philosophe), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity and...

Joseph-Louis Lagrange

18 Joseph-Louis Lagrange, also reported as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange or Lagrangia, was an Italian and naturalized French mathematician, physicist and astronomer. He made significant contributions to the...

Rembrandt

18 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, mononymously known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman. He is generally considered one of the greatest visual artists in the...

Genevieve

17 Genevieve was a consecrated virgin, and is one of the two patron saints of Paris in the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church. Her feast day is on 3 January.

Galen

17 Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus, often anglicized as Galen or Galen of Pergamon, was a Roman and Greek physician, surgeon, and philosopher. Considered to be one of the most accomplished of all...

Miguel de Cervantes

16 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists. He is best known for his two-part novel...

Ludwig van Beethoven

16 Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of classical music, and his symphonies redefined the medium for later...

Franz Schubert

16 Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre of thousands of works, including more than 600...

Frederick Sanger

15 Frederick Sanger was a British biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice.         

Bernardino of Siena

15 Bernardino of Siena, OFM, was an Italian Catholic priest and Franciscan missionary preacher in the Republic of Siena. He was a systematizer of scholastic economics.

Giuseppe Verdi

15 Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto, a small town in the modern province of Parma, to a family of moderate means, receiving...

Giuseppe Garibaldi

15 Giuseppe Maria Garibaldi was an Italian general, revolutionary and republican. He contributed to the Unification of Italy (Risorgimento) and the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. He is considered to...

John Steinbeck

15 John Ernst Steinbeck was an American writer and novelist. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social...

Marie Curie

14 Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie, better known as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie "for...

Frédéric Chopin

14 Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic period who wrote primarily for solo piano. He has maintained worldwide renown as a leading composer of his era...

Lord Kelvin

14 William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, was a British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer. Born in Belfast, he was for 53 years the professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of...

John Lennon

14 John Winston Ono Lennon was an English musician and activist. He gained global fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. Lennon's songwriting partnership with Paul...

Francisco Pizarro

13 Francisco Pizarro was a Spanish conquistador, best known for his expeditions that led to the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.

Vincent van Gogh

13 Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately...

Plato

13 Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher of Classical Athens who is most commonly considered the foundational thinker of the Western philosophical tradition. An innovator of the literary dialogue and...

Hercules

13 Hercules is the Roman equivalent of the Greek divine hero Heracles, son of Jupiter and the mortal Alcmena. In classical mythology, Hercules is famous for his strength and for his numerous far-ranging...

Saint Patrick

13 Saint Patrick was a fifth-century Romano-British Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Known as the "Apostle of Ireland", he is the primary patron saint of Ireland, the other patron saints...

Charlie Chaplin

13 Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. was an English comic actor, filmmaker, film editor and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the...

Bernard of Clairvaux

12 Bernard of Clairvaux, O.Cist., venerated as Saint Bernard, was an abbot, mystic, co-founder of the Knights Templar, and a major leader in the reform of the Benedictines through the nascent Cistercian...

Francis Drake

12 Sir Francis Drake was an English explorer and privateer best known for making the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition between 1577 and 1580. He is also known for participating...

Augustus

12 Augustus, also known as Octavian, was the founder of the Roman Empire and the first Roman emperor from 27 BC until his death in AD 14. The reign of Augustus initiated an imperial cult and an era of...

Saint Dominic

12 Saint Dominic, also known as Dominic de Guzmán, was a Castilian Catholic priest and the founder of the Dominican Order. He is the patron saint of astronomers and natural scientists, and he and his...

Blaise Pascal

12 Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.   

Meriwether Lewis

12 Meriwether Lewis was an American explorer, soldier, politician, and public administrator, best known for his role as the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of...

Charlemagne

12 Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor of what is now known as the Carolingian Empire from 800. He united most of Western and Central Europe and was...

Galileo Galilei

12 Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei, commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei, was an Italian astronomer, physicist, and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. He was born in the city of...

Willie Mays

11 Willie Howard Mays Jr., nicknamed "the Say Hey Kid", was an American professional baseball center fielder who played 23 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB). Widely regarded as one of the greatest...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, philosophe, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

11 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on literary, political,...

Louis Pasteur

11 Louis Pasteur was a French chemist, pharmacist, and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the last of which was...

Julius Caesar

10 Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general, statesman, and author who was the dictator of the Roman Republic almost continuously from 49 BC until his assassination in 44 BC. A member of the First...

Gottlieb Daimler

10 Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler was a German engineer, industrial designer and industrialist. He was a pioneer of internal-combustion engines and automobile development. He invented the high-speed liquid...

Elvis Presley

10 Elvis Aaron Presley was an American singer and actor. Referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll", he is widely regarded as one of the most culturally significant figures of the 20th century....

Alfred Nobel

9 Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, inventor, engineer, and businessman. He is known for inventing dynamite, as well as having bequeathed his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes. He also...

Michelangelo

9 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known mononymously as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. He was born in the Republic of Florence...

Émile Zola

8 Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of...

Ovid

8 Publius Ovidius Naso, known in English as Ovid, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a younger contemporary of Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the...

Alessandro Volta

8 Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was an Italian chemist and physicist who was a pioneer of electricity and power, and is credited as the inventor of the electric battery and the discoverer...

Johannes Brahms

8 Johannes Brahms was a German composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. His music is noted for its rhythmic vitality and freer treatment of dissonance, often set within...

Elizabeth II

8 Elizabeth II was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states during her lifetime and was the...

Ralph Bunche

8 Ralph Johnson Bunche was an American political scientist, diplomat, and leading actor in the mid-20th-century decolonization process and US civil rights movement, who received the 1950 Nobel Peace...

Achilles

8 In Greek mythology, Achilles or Achilleus was a hero of the Trojan War who was known as being the greatest of all the Greek warriors. The central character in Homer's Iliad, he was the son of the...

Nikola Tesla

7 Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American engineer, futurist, and inventor. He is known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

Robert Schuman

7 Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Robert Schuman was a Luxembourg-born French statesman. Schuman was a Christian democratic political thinker and activist. Twice Prime Minister of France, a reformist Minister of...

Ada Lovelace

7 Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer,...

Johannes Kepler

7 Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and music theorist. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of...

Gioachino Rossini

7 Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. He gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano...

Joseph Erlanger

6 Joseph Erlanger was an American physiologist who is best known for his contributions to the field of neuroscience. Together with Herbert Spencer Gasser, he identified several varieties of nerve fiber...

Hadrian

6 Hadrian was Roman emperor from 117 to 138. Hadrian was born in Italica, in the present-day Andalusian province of Seville in southern Spain, an Italic settlement in Hispania Baetica; his gens Aelia...

Salvador Dalí

6 Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí de Púbol, known as Salvador Dalí, was a Spanish surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the...

Marcus Aurelius

6 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors and...

Ferdinand von Zeppelin

6 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was a German general and later inventor of the Zeppelin rigid airships. His name became synonymous with airships and dominated long-distance flight until the 1930s. He...

Cecilia of Rome

6 Cecilia of Rome, also spelled Cecelia, was a Christian virgin martyr, who is venerated in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and some Lutheran churches, such as the Church of Sweden. She became the...

Marco Polo

6 Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant, explorer, and writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295. His travels are recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo, a book that...

Karl Marx

6 Karl Marx was a German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto, and his...

Aristotle

5 Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the...

Thomas Paine

5 Thomas Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman. His pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783)...

Rudolf Diesel

5 Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, best known for inventing the diesel engine, which burns diesel fuel; both are named after him.

John Bardeen

5 John Bardeen was an American solid-state physicist. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Houser Brattain for their...

Thomas Nelson Jr.

5 Thomas Nelson Jr. was a Founding Father of the United States, general in the Revolutionary War, member of the Continental Congress, and a Virginia planter. In addition to serving many terms in the...

Queen Victoria

5 Victoria was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days, which was longer than those of any of her...

Felix Mendelssohn

5 Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include...

Ferdinand Porsche

5 Ferdinand Porsche was an Austrian-German automotive engineer and founder of the Porsche AG. He is best known for creating the first gasoline-electric hybrid vehicle (Lohner-Porsche), the Volkswagen...

Gregor Mendel

5 Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno (Brünn), Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a...

Leo Tolstoy

5 Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time.

Albert Einstein

5 Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence...

Linus Pauling

4 Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist and peace activist. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. Scientific American called him one of...

Fridtjof Nansen

4 Fridtjof Wedel-Jarlsberg Nansen was a Norwegian polymath and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He gained prominence at various points in his life as an explorer, a scientist, a diplomat, a humanitarian,...

Antonio Vivaldi

4 Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an Italian composer, virtuoso violinist and impresario of Baroque music. Regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, Vivaldi's influence during his lifetime was...

Franz Liszt

4 Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic period. With a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades, he is considered to be one of the...

David Attenborough

4 Sir David Frederick Attenborough is an English broadcaster, natural historian and writer. His presenting career began as host of Zoo Quest in 1954, and has spanned eight decades; it includes the nine...

Nicolaus Copernicus

4 Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. The publication of Copernicus's model in his book De...

Albert Schweitzer

4 Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was a German polymath from Alsace. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. As a Lutheran minister, Schweitzer...

Heinrich Hertz

4 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was a German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves proposed by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.

Augustine Herman

4 Augustine Herman, First Lord of Bohemia Manor was a Bohemian explorer, merchant and cartographer who lived in New Amsterdam and Cecil County, Maryland. In the employment of Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron...

André-Marie Ampère

3 André-Marie Ampère was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as electrodynamics. He made also important...

Hubert of Liège

3 Hubert of Liège was a Christian saint who became the first bishop of Liège in 708 A.D. He is a patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers. Known as the "Apostle of the...

Robert Millikan

3 Robert Andrews Millikan was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923 "for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect."

Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell

3 Lieutenant-General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, was a British Army officer, writer, founder of The Boy Scouts Association and its first Chief Scout, and founder, with...

Babe Ruth

3 George Herman "Babe" Ruth was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball (MLB) spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935. Nicknamed "the Bambino" and "the Sultan...

Byron Nelson

3 John Byron Nelson Jr. was an American professional golfer between 1935 and 1946, widely considered one of the greatest golfers of all time.

Josip Broz Tito

3 Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito, was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and politician who led Yugoslavia as prime minister from 1943 to 1963 and as president from 1953 until his death in 1980. He...

Roald Amundsen

3 Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He was a key figure of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

Albert Camus

3 Albert Camus was a French philosopher, novelist, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44,...

Salvador Allende

3 Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens was a Chilean socialist politician who served as the 29th president of Chile from 1970 until his death in 1973. As a socialist committed to democracy, he has been...

Cleopatra

3 Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and the last active Hellenistic pharaoh. A member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its...