Okay. I have a perverse fondness for lists. As in, yesterday I watched Vh1's 100 Most Shocking Moments in Rock 'n' Roll for the umpteenth time, and I know what the number one moment is and have for, like, five years.

But the other day, in Barnes & Noble, I encountered a book called 1000 People, 1000 Years, or possibly the other way 'round. It's fascinating, but chock full of people who are either too high or don't belong on the list at all. (Sigmund Freud as number 15?) And then yesterday, I got Biography of the Millennium: 100 People, 1000 Years out of the library, and their list--having been voted on in part by the general public--is too heavily weighted to 20th Century figures. (The Beatles ahead of Elizabeth I?)

So my best friend and I have decided to do our own list. However, in an acknowledgement of our own intellectual limitations, we are asking for help. Just as an example, the 1000 people list gives little bios, and for a lot of them, when my best friend asks who they are, I skim it and reply, "some science person." Clearly, this is where you guys come in.

We also need help with people outside the very specific periods of history that interest us. 16th Century England is great, but who's to say Sir Walter Raleigh is really greater than someone I haven't heard of because they're from, say, 13th Century Germany?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Um ... shouldn't that be Ralegh?

Grant Hutchison

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Heck, Shakespeare spelled his name differently in just about every extant signature we have for him, and Sir Francis Drake didn't spell his last name with an "e" at the end!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
(Most of his extant signatures spell it "Ralegh".)

Grant Hutchison

Gillian, what are the criteria you are looking for this list: most influential (for good or bad?, to humans?, to the planet?), greatest or best? It is also implied, but not stated, that it is limited to the past 1000 years.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

I believe it was cocaine that Freud used to get high. Cheating? Maybe. But that was before steroid testing

Sorry, yes. The last 1000 years; I don't feel adequate to "in history." (For one thing, about half the entries would be things like "that guy who invented the wheel" or similar. Easily the top ten wouldn't have recorded names!)

At the moment, I'm just collecting ideas. I do not require that the person's influence be good, at least in part because I don't think anyone's influence entirely was. (Take the horrors following Gandhi's successful freeing of India from English rule!) Their influence can be in any field, though I suspect that the ones we rank higher will be in multiple fields. Their impact can be on humans, the planet, or the biosphere--or even space, in the case of quite a few of the 20th Century people I can think of. (Neil made the book, but I don't believe Buzz did. Also, Watson but not Crick. Odd, huh?) Greater weight will eventually be given to people with a wider sphere of influence, but again, I'm not worrying about that. I'd like to have well more than a thousand people before I start narrowing down and ranking, and though I could probably list well over that myself, I don't really understand the level of contribution of a lot of people that are outside my particular field of study.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Ok, to get the ball rolling, here are some names, without justifications, and in no particular order:

Leonardo da Vinci
Newton
Einstein
Galileo
Darwin
Shakesphere
Ghandi
Thomas Jefferson
Gutenberg
Hitler
Carl Marx
Napoleon

edited to add
Picasso

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

I like lots of Swift's picks, but decided not to overlap. Again, with no justification and no order.

Maxwell
Genghis Kahn
Michelangelo
Bach
Beethoven
Mozart
Dickens
Dirac
Feynman
Bohr
Stalin
Lenin
Mandela
Lincoln
Joshua Chamberlain
Milo Farnsworth
Tesla
Marconi
Edison
Stephen Crane
Nobel
Samuel Colt
Oliver Winchester
Henry Ford
Rudolf Diesel
Ben Franklin
Thomas Jefferson
Eli Whitney
Robert Fulton
Churchill

Edited to add:
van Gogh
Monet
Rembrandt
Kant
Chairman Mao

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The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924

Um, turbo-1, I'm going to need identification of some of those. Like Dirac. And is Joshua Chamberlain Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of Battle of Gettysburg fame?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Paul Dirac, Nobel prize winner for his work in quantum mechanics (I assume).

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009

From a more religious bent...

Martin Luther
Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

Keeping with the trend of "no particular order":

Columbus
Magellan
Cpt. Cook
Linnaeus
Tolstoy
Oppenheimer
Gates
Wright brothers
Bardeen/Brattain/Shockley
Gagarin

Like most such lists, we'll likely end up with a preponderance of westerners/Europeans. We need someone with a knowledge of Asiatic history to contribute.

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Two things we know are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And we're not sure about the universe.

al-Khwarizmi (even though he's before the cutoff date)
Omar Khayyam
al-Haytham
Fibonacci
Johanus de Nemore
Scipione del Ferro
Gerolamo Cardano
Federigo Commandino
Franchesco Maurolico
John Dee
Robert Record
Thomas Harriot
René Descartes
John Napier
Tycho Brahe
Johannes Kepler
William Oughtred
Sir Charles Cavendish
Thomas Hobbes
Marin Mersenne
Pierre de Fermat
Blaise Pascal
Voltaire
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Bernoulli
Euler
Lagrange
Gauss
Bessel
Galois
Cauchy
Legendre
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (of Tom Lehrer fame)
János Bolyai
Riemann
Klein
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
Gabriel José García Márquez
August Ferdinand Möbius
Samuel Pepys

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

There was a TV show along this line shortly before the turn of the millenium. Or, depending on your point of view, a year before the turn as it was in December 1999. They did the usual sort of countdown and after number 2 (Newton, I think) they went to a commercial. I was stumped; all of my top choices had already been shown.
Number 1 was Gutenberg. I can't really argue with that.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Yes. That was the A&E one, which, as I said, I watched again this week. (Well, today, mostly.)

Can I ask for at least a sentence about who some of these people are? I mean, Martin Luther, okay. But I think we've established that I won't know a lot of the science types--and I'm almost sure, turbo-1, that you meant Philo Farnsworth, not Milo, but since there's no identification, I can't be sure. (If you do, though, you're not alone in making that error. I guess people don't realize "Philo" is a name.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Most of the people I'd have come up with have already been listed, but I'll add these three.

Gottlieb Daimler - invented the motor vehicle petrol engine.

Michael Faraday - Bio on this page.

John Harrison - solved the problem of calculating longitude at sea by inventing a new type of clock.

Thank you--you're totally right about Harrison, and I would've forgotten him entirely.

I think what's going to be the hardest is deciding how much influence artists have relative to scientists and politicians and religious leaders (oh, my!). I can look at, say, Tycho Brahe or J. Robert Oppenheimer and point to very specific effects on modern life. But is it greater or lesser than that of Beethoven? (And my cowriter on this project won't go for Cook, deserving though I think he is--she grew up in Hawaii, and they're still upset about how he treated the natives there. She also tends to say of very deserving sorts, "But anyone could've done that," and then we end up talking about Wallace and Leibniz.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Cecil Rhodes- fundamental in the European colonization of Africa (but not a nice person)
Gunmaker Dr. Richard Gatling had an effect on the late 18th century on to the present day.
Musashi Miyamoto- Japanse samurai and author of "The Book of Five Rings" which is still studied as a guide to strategy.
Sun Tzu- Chinese author of the Art of War would be good, but he's about 1500 years too early

Edit to add, John Browning- Designer of the first really successful semi auto pistol, as well as a number of guns used thoughout the 20th century.
Igor Sikorski- Basically the father of the modern helicopter.

Have you given any thought to maybe categorizing the entries to make it easier. Listing the top X# of artists without actually placing them at a specific point in top 1000? That way you could avoid having to decide whether Hemmingway was more influential than Picasso or Churchill. Just a thought. Also, I'd think Cook should be there regardless of how he behaved. If Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin can be there, Surely Cook can as well.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.