Science News Review

Most Influential Scientists Today

Sep 26 at 11:11am by Ryan

As we all know, our society is a scientific one. All of our modern conveniences are the bounty of great scientific advances. But most of us don’t know the scientists who have most shaped our lives. Yesterday someone sent me a list of the twenty most influential scientists alive and I’ll be completely honest… I had only heard of about half of them.

You’d think as someone who follows science news closely I’d know more of these people. But this is just testament to the fact that we don’t know our living scientists as well as we should.

Here’s the list:

1. Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Le
2. Noam Chomsky
3. Richard Dawkins
4. Persi Diaconis
5. Jane Goodall
6. Alan Guth
7. Stephen Hawking
8. Donald Knuth
9. Lynn Margulis
10. Gordon Moore
11. Roger Penrose
12. Allan Sandage
13. Frederick Sanger
14. Charles Townes
15. Craig Venter
16. James Watson
17. Steven Weinberg
18. Andrew Wiles
19. Edward O. Wilson
20. Edward Witten

How many of these scientists have you heard of?

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