Roko: rather than picking out of random, it’d be better to start with a survey of the historical literature. Fortunately, the search and statistical ranking has already been done in Human Accomplishment.
For the combined science index, we get:
Newton
Galileo
Aristotle
Kepler
Lavoisier
Descartes
Huygens
Laplace
Einstein
Faraday
It’s a list that seems reasonable to me, as surprising as Lavoisier, Huygens, and Faraday may be.
Of course, it misses out the philosophers, but they appear in the “western philosophy” list. Since aristotle, plato, descartes and hume all appear in the top ten of that list, it seems that the only odd ones out in my list are bacon, darwin and socrates.
But, a larger list will not hurt us. So I’ll throw in the top ten from combined sciences, and the top ten from philosophy. Corr, that’s going to be quite some work to do…
Roko: rather than picking out of random, it’d be better to start with a survey of the historical literature. Fortunately, the search and statistical ranking has already been done in Human Accomplishment.
For the combined science index, we get:
Newton
Galileo
Aristotle
Kepler
Lavoisier
Descartes
Huygens
Laplace
Einstein
Faraday
It’s a list that seems reasonable to me, as surprising as Lavoisier, Huygens, and Faraday may be.
OK, that’s an interesting list.
Of course, it misses out the philosophers, but they appear in the “western philosophy” list. Since aristotle, plato, descartes and hume all appear in the top ten of that list, it seems that the only odd ones out in my list are bacon, darwin and socrates.
But, a larger list will not hurt us. So I’ll throw in the top ten from combined sciences, and the top ten from philosophy. Corr, that’s going to be quite some work to do…