The Greatest People Of The 20th Century

[James]

My top 10 (of the most influential--not necessarily the greatest):

1. Einstein
2. Edison
3. The Wright Brothers
4. Hitler
5. Elvis
6. Billy Graham
7. Picasso
8. Bill Gates
9. Osama bin Laden
10. (Was Marx alive in 1900?)

[Jack]

Nope.
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, England)

[Zealot]

Interested in your thoughts. I will keep a running tally, which we shall determine Volconvo's people of the century. Here's how the voting works, first place your first choice worth 3 points. Then your second choice worth 2 points. And your third choice worth one. Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

1st: T.E. Lawrence
2nd: Mustafa Ataturk
3rd: Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Current Tally
Che 1
Ataturk 2
Lawrence 3

Ronald Reagan
Billy Grahm
Zealot

[Microb]

1- Joseph Staline. Proove the superiotity of Communism over Capitalism. Play the most importat role in the Nazi defeat.

2- Fidel Castro. Succeed in revolution and maintain of independant policy at less than 100 miles of the Empire.

3- Charlie Chaplin. Shows in the most spectacular way, that art is not separate from life and humanism.

[barts]

I would suggest Nikola Tesla. Nikola Tesla because he invented/discovered alternating current basically invented the 20th century. Without alternating current, most of the technology that people take for granted today would not be possible.

[Jack]

I'd nominate Dennis Ritchie. If you believe the impact of the Internet on our society may be as great or greater than that of the telephone or television then Ritchie has been responsible for it having that impact.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, working at Bell Labs, Mr. Ritchie made a pair of lasting contributions to computer science. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system, working closely with Ken Thompson, his longtime Bell Labs collaborator.

The C programming language, a shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation, is still widely used today, and successors like C++ and Java build on the ideas, rules and grammar that Mr. Ritchie designed. The Unix operating system has similarly had a rich and enduring impact. Its free, open-source variant, Linux, powers many of the world’s data centers, like those at Google and Amazon, and its technology serves as the foundation of operating systems, like Apple’s iOS, in consumer computing devices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/te...ies-at-70.html

Before C, there was far more hardware diversity than we see in the industry today. Computers proudly sported not just deliciously different and offbeat instruction sets, but varied wildly in almost everything, right down to even things as fundamental as character bit widths (8 bits per byte doesn’t suit you? how about 9? or 7? or how about sometimes 6 and sometimes 12?) and memory addressing (don’t like 16-bit pointers? how about 18-bit pointers, and oh by the way those aren’t pointers to bytes, they’re pointers to words?).

There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware. Fortran did okay for array-oriented number-crunching code, but nobody could do it for general-purpose code such as what you’d use to build just about anything down to, oh, say, an operating system.

So this young upstart whippersnapper comes along and decides to try to specify a language that will let people write programs that are: (a) high-level, with structures and functions; (b) portable to just about any kind of hardware; and (c) efficient on that hardware so that they’re competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code on that hardware. A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language.

How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done.

C is a poster child for why it’s essential to keep those people who know a thing can’t be done from bothering the people who are doing it. (And keep them out of the way while the same inventors, being anything but lazy and always in search of new problems to conquer, go on to use the world’s first portable and efficient programming language to build the world’s first portable operating system, not knowing that was impossible too.)

http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie/

[Muckraker]

I'd nominate Dennis Ritchie. If you believe the impact of the Internet on our society may be as great or greater than that of the telephone or television then Ritchie has been responsible for it having that impact.

I'll second that. The internet is empowering. With it I have access to the combined knowledge of humanity as well as instructions on how to apply that knowledge. I can showcase myself, infinitely entertain myself, communicate with people from all over the world with relative anonymity, and do all of this while watching a home sex tape of my favorite celebrity. And the cost for doing this is just my time.

The telephone made it possible for masses of people that didn't know much to speak with masses of other people that didn't know much--assuming they had phone numbers and weren't already sitting next to the person they wanted to talk to. Television is a one-way, biased distributor of profitable manipulation, trashy diversion, and--rarely--useful information.

Internet all the way.

[The Fyrdman]

1- Joseph Staline. Proove the superiotity of Communism over Capitalism. Play the most importat role in the Nazi defeat.

2- Fidel Castro. Succeed in revolution and maintain of independant policy at less than 100 miles of the Empire.

3- Charlie Chaplin. Shows in the most spectacular way, that art is not separate from life and humanism.

Haha.

Stalin? One highly socialised system makes arguably the largest contribution in the destruction of another highly socialised system, and this demonstrates the superiority of socialised states over capitalist ones?

Fidel. Fidel ousts Batista's regime because it was illiberal and allowed corruption, gambling and prostitution to flourish. Che pushes Fidel to USSR and Communism following frosty reception to his revolution in the US. It stagnates for 30 years under heavy subsidies from the Soviet Union. USSR collapses and funds dry up, situation deteriates in Cuba quickly. Now, with some petrol subsidy in exchange for doctors (undoubtedly good doctors, though you'd have to be with such crap resources), Cuba finally starts to pick up as it allows gambling and prostitution to start up again...

Charlie Chaplin? I won't knock his work (too much, Modern Times is a little overbearing with the political sentiment) but one of the 20th centuries greats?

[The Fyrdman]

Only three? Ah man I hate limiting this.

1) Che Guevara
2) John Lennon
3) Gerry Adams (and the rest of the IRA reformers)

This is a personal list, it has nothing to do with really being greatest of the 20th century, more the the people who have had the greatest impact on me from the 20th century. Che and John Lennon are heroes to me, and while Gerry isn't his shifting of the Irish cause in Northern Ireland has probably saved half my family, for which I am obviously grateful. I also took his name for the ranting boards I use, but that was to be ironic, though I don't know why now...

Oh how times change. You live and learn. Che murdered and imprisoned people for being gay and listening to rock music before I even start on how many he killed for the crime of disagreeing with him. John Lennon, well thanks but hell I'd make you the third Beatle these days. And Gerry? Bastard was in command of the IRA for years.

Now? Friedrich Hayak, Dennis Ritchie and Norman Borlaug.

[Jack]

Isn't it good to know we mature and can change our opinions on things?

[The Fyrdman]

Isn't it good to know we mature and can change our opinions on things?

Hell yeah, I would have sworn blind you couldn't have moved me from at least that area of the political spectrum at the time. Now look at me, borderline opposite. You can never run out of life's lessons if you're willing to learn.