Here is a list from another 100 greatest book. I'm curious what you all think.

1. Prophet Muhammad
2. Isaac Newton
3. Jesus Christ
4. Buddha
5. Confucius
6. St. Paul
7. Ts'ai Lun
8. Johann Gutenberg
9. Christopher Columbus
10. Albert Einstein
11. Karl Marx
12. Louis Pasteur
13. Galileo Galilei
14. Aristotle
15. Lenin
16. Moses
17. Charles Darwin
18. Shih Huang Ti
19. Augustus Caesar
20. Mao Tse-tung
21. Genghis Khan
22. Euclid
23. Martin Luther
24. Nicolaus Copernicus
25. James Watt
26. Constantine the Great
27. George Washington
28. Michael Faraday
29. James Clerk Maxwell
30. Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright
31. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
32. Sigmund Freud
33. Alexander the Great
34. Napoleon Bonaparte
35. Adolf Hitler
36. William Shakespeare
37. Adam Smith
38. Thomas Edison
39. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek
40. Plato
41. Guglielmo Marconi
42. Ludwig van Beethoven
43. Werner Heisenberb
44. Alexander Graham Bell
45. Alexander Fleming
46. Simon Bolivar
47. Oliver Cromwell
48. John Locke
49. Michelangelo
50. Pope Urban II
51. Umar ibn al-Khattab
52. Asoka
53. St. Augustine
54. Max Planck
55. John Calvin
56. William T.G. Morton
57. William Harvey
58. Antoine Henri Becquerel
59. Gregor Mendel
60. Joseph Lister
61. Nikolaus August Otto
62. Louis Daguerre
63. Joseph Stalin
64. Rene Descartes
65. Julius Caesar
66. Francisco Pizarro
67. Hernando Cortes
68. Queen Isabella I
69. William the Conqueror
70. Thomas Jefferson
71. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
72. Edward Jenner
73. Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen
74. Hohann Sebastian Bach
75. Lao Tzu
76. Enrico Fermi
77. Thomas Malthus
78. Francis Bacon
79. Voltaire
80. John F. Kennedy
81. Gregory Pincus
82. Sui Wen Ti
83. Mani
84. Vasco da Gama
85. Charlemagne
86. Cyprus the Great
87. Leonhard Euler
88. Niccolo Machiavelli
89. Zoroaster
90. Menes
91. Peter the Great
92. Mencius
93. John Dalton
94. Homer
95. Queen Elizabeth
96. Justinian I
97. fJohannes Kepler
98. Pablo Picasso
99. Mahavira
100. Niels Bohr
Honorable Mentions and Interesting Misses:
· St. Thomas Aquinas
· Archimedes
· Charles Babbage
· Cheops
· Marie Curie
· Benjamin Franklin
· Gandhi
· Abraham Lincoln
· Ferdinand Magellan
· Leonardo da Vinci

Descartes is too high.

Aquinas deserves to be MUCH higher. Considering that much of his writing is still Catholic dogma, I'd say he's pretty damn influential. More so than Augustine. Most Catholics know what they know of Aristotle via Aquinas...I'd put Aquinas in the top 20.

Newton over Christ? I'm not sure about that.

Adam Smith over Plato? Hmm.

I'm surprised John Lennon or the Beatles didn't make it.

I would prefer Galileo to Newton, but I like that Christ gets knocked down one spot by placing Saint Paul at 6 I think. They split the Jesus influence, which seems to me fairly accurate.

I have a major problem with Kennedy making the list. I guess he represents the space race, but he's still nowhere near the 100 most influencial. I would take any of the runners-up over Kennedy.

I can not believe this list!

Apparently you have to be dead (Preferably for more than 40 years) to make the list.

Da vinci an honourable mention!

Are you kidding!

No John Lennon or Paul McCartney.

Are you kidding.

No Amerigo Vespucci.

No Elvis.

I just could go on and on.....

I think it is not out of the question that in the entire history of civilization Elvis and the Beatles could fail to make the 100 most important people. I love pop music as much as anyone, but it's pretty limited in influence if you ask me.

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Originally posted by keylimetrev:
I love pop music as much as anyone, but it's pretty limited in influence if you ask me.

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Now you're just playin' me , right?

no kidding.

music is utterly influencial to me, and to you, and to most of the people on this board. I spend the vast majority of my spare cash on music, and can't imagine my life without it. With that said, I don't think it is absurd to think that the best rock musicians don't make a list of the 100 most influencial. How can they compete with the other people on the list (JFK excluded).

OK.

I'm speaking from personal experience, so maybe that's where I don't get it.

Music has kept me alive, so I count that as influential.

I can see s_c's point here. Music can have more than a merely aesthetic impact. I think the Beatles' impact on the mood and attitude of the 1960's goes FAR beyond the music itself. Elvis, as the beginning of rock 'n' roll, might be the same way (although I'm not certain I'd give him that much credit)...it was a social and cultural vanguard. I think punk rock circa 1976 is the same way, although it would not be fair to put the weight on one person's shoulders. Is being at the vanguard of a cultural revolution any less important than an important invention?

As far as music goes, Beethoven is at 42. Bach is at 74.

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Is being at the vanguard of a cultural revolution any less important than an important invention?

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I think my answer to this question is why I don't think the Beatles belong. As much as they were much more than just a band, I think that the cultural revolution that they were the leaders of would have existed without them. Certainly they played a big part in it, but the time was right when the Beatles came around, and I think that even if they had never existed, we probably would have still had a very similar set of events.

The problem with saying that is that a lot of the people on the list were in a similar right-place-at-the-right-time. Calculus and Newton's laws were probably going to be figured out within a 50-100 span, whether or not Newton ever lived. Galileo pretty much saw to that by setting the groundwork for all of modern science.

I think this is why the religious figures have to be so high. They are the rare occasions where there is a good chance that huge areas of our civilization would have been completely missed if a single individual had never lived. I think I might move Hitler and Stalin up the list for this reason also. I think there is good evidence that WWII may not have happened if Hitler had not lived. That is a huge influence in my eyes.

Why is Michelangelo so high but Da Vinci didn't even make the list? I think that Da Vinci would be more "Influential" than Homer. Charles Darwin is far too high on the list, somebody had already discovered "Natural Selection" before he had even thought of it. I don't see how someone who created a theory on how human came to be is any more influential than members of the Beatles. Also, why is Aristotle so high, but his mentor, Plato, at 40, and Plato's mentor, Socrates, not even mentioned?

I think Charles Darwin is high on the list because he popularized evolution. Whether or not he was the first to discover it, he is the person who made evolution a concept known around the world. It's the same reason that Columbus is so high even though he wasn't even the first westerner to discover the Americas.

I agree that Plato is too low, although I would definately keep Aristotle higher than Plato.

I think the publicity machines have a lot to do with where people are rated, and I use Amerigo Vespucci as my example.

He just didn't get the good press that Columbus got.

Thank god for map makers.

How come none of them are on the list.

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Originally posted by keylimetrev:

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Is being at the vanguard of a cultural revolution any less important than an important invention?

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I think my answer to this question is why I don't think the Beatles belong. As much as they were much more than just a band, I think that the cultural revolution that they were the leaders of would have existed without them. Certainly they played a big part in it, but the time was right when the Beatles came around, and I think that even if they had never existed, we probably would have still had a very similar set of events.

The problem with saying that is that a lot of the people on the list were in a similar right-place-at-the-right-time. Calculus and Newton's laws were probably going to be figured out within a 50-100 span, whether or not Newton ever lived.

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I think you're probably right about the Beatles. Maybe the spirit of the 60's is supposed to be embodied in JFK, but I personally think Martin Luther King and Gandhi should have made it in his place.

And Newton, of course, wasn't the only one to discover calculus. Leibniz did it concurrently, but doesn't get much credit for it. Of course, his windowless monads don't help his credibility...

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Originally posted by Mike:
Also, why is Aristotle so high, but his mentor, Plato, at 40, and Plato's mentor, Socrates, not even mentioned?

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I think Socrates gets the shaft because it's not at all clear what he actually said or thought. Of course, Plato tells us a lot about Socrates, but there's not any consensus that the historical person Socrates was actually that much like the guy Plato describes.

Aristotle is higher, I think, and deserves to be so because his overall influence on those who followed him (the Catholics, the Muslims) was stronger than Plato's. Of course, if we play the mentor game, we can push it back ad absurdum. I think people find Aristotle's views on things more tenable overall, although Plato's got the edge of being the teacher.

Leibniz and his crazy monads. I actually had a modern philosophy professor who I think was pretty persuaded by the idea. Am i right that the crazy philosopher in Candide was based on Leibniz and his best of all possible worlds talk? Wasn't there possibly even a third guy who figured out calculus at the same time as Newton and Leibniz? Of course, to hammer on the greatness of Galileo for another time, he almost figured calculus out before the others were even born.

I like the sound of them monads.

Hey, I might even be a crazy monad.

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Originally posted by keylimetrev:
Leibniz and his crazy monads. I actually had a modern philosophy professor who I think was pretty persuaded by the idea. Am i right that the crazy philosopher in Candide was based on Leibniz and his best of all possible worlds talk?

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Yeah, Candide was supposed to be a parody of Leibnizian best-of-all-worlds talk. Voltaire really rakes him across the coals...I teach part of Candide in my Phil History course, as a reply to Leibniz. I also love teaching Descartes' correspondence with Hobbes...

Personally, of all of the early modern rationalists, I find Spinoza the most appealing.

Moses is at 16? Ha! Ha! Ha!

J.C. is beneath Newton? Did somebody drug test the responders?

There's too many others to comment on, so I'll leave those to y'all.

Well, I would definitely have to say that I really disagree with this list. Putting Columbus at 9!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That makes me sooo angry. After repeatedly learning history at my school, it takes a fool to think that Columbus discovered America. There were MANY Europeans that founded "America" first, let alone Asian countries and the Native Americans. It DISGUSTS me that they put a murderous, evil, selfish, idiotic person who NEVER actually knew he discovered America and thought he discovered India would get credit for such a high spot over SO many more influential people.

Of course, I am terribly disturbed at the fact that Da Vinci was failed to be mentioned. I find much of his work quite intriguing and know that he was not only an amazing artist, but an inventer of all types of objects and was undoubtedly brilliant.

Also, I really am surprised that Gandhi didnt make it. I am a person of peace, and he inspires me greatly.

Benjamin Franklin invented more objects than one can imagine, let alone being a brillant philosopher (is that the right termonology, pE?) and a great part of the American Revolution.

And John F Kennedy????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Out of all the presidents, I see no particular greatness in this one, besides the fact that he was assasinated. I would love to know the logic behind this pick.