The 40 Most Important Historical Characters

The great works and feats have to be done working as a team, a single person can not defeat the crowd.

However, in my opinion there will always be leaders who are driving change, people who get out of the way followed by the crowd and try to achieve very ambitious goals.

There are hundreds of historical figures Illustrious Famous people who have influenced in a significant way in the world, either with their ideas, actions, inventions or discoveries. Unfortunately, others influenced the evil of humanity.

I will make a list of the most celebrated and important characters, and I will mention their most relevant aspects. I'm sure that I'm missing some, so I encourage you to leave in the comments those that escape me.

As a matter of curiosity, note that some are in the List I made of famous psychopaths . You may also like she is ready Of the most important scientists or this Of the most outstanding writers.

Charles Darwin

He was an English naturalist who postulated that all species of living beings have evolved over time from a common ancestor through a process called natural selection.
His theory forms the basis of the modern evolutionary synthesis and constitutes a logical explanation that unifies the observations on the diversity of the life.

Aristotle

It was a polymath: philosopher, logic and scientist of Ancient Greece whose ideas have had an enormous influence on the intellectual history of the West for more than 2000 years.
He wrote about 200 treatises on logic, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, rhetoric, physics, astronomy, and biology.
He is recognized as the founder of logic and biology.
He formulated the theory of spontaneous generation, the principle of non-contradiction, the notions of category, substance, act, power and first mover immobile.

Napoleon I Bonaparte

He was a French military and ruler, Republican general during the Revolution and the Directory, French emperor from 1804 until 1815.
For 10 years it gained control of almost all Western and Central Europe through a series of conquests and alliances.
Napoleon is considered one of the greatest military geniuses of history.
He established the Napoleonic Code.
He is judged as the key character that marked the beginning of the nineteenth century and the subsequent evolution of contemporary Europe.

Julius Caesar

He was a military and political leader of the late-republican era.
He established the Julian calendar.
He was the first living Roman leader whose face appeared in a currency in circulation.
Apart from his political and military career, César stood out as a speaker and writer. He wrote at least one treatise on astronomy, another on the Roman republic religion and a study on Latin

Plato

He was a Greek philosopher follower of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle.
In 387 he founded the Academy, an institution that would continue its march for more than nine hundred years.
He wrote on the most diverse subjects, such as political philosophy, ethics, psychology, philosophical anthropology, epistemology, gnoseology, metaphysics, cosmogony, cosmology, philosophy of language and philosophy of education.
His influence as author and systematizer has been incalculable throughout the history of philosophy.

William Shakespeare

He was an English playwright, poet and actor.
He is considered the most important writer in English language and one of the most celebrated of the universal literature.
He was a poet and playwright revered in his time, but his reputation did not reach the current high levels until the nineteenth century.
In the twentieth century, his works were adapted and rediscovered on many occasions by all kinds of artistic, intellectual and dramatic art movements.

Albert Einstein

He was a German physicist, nationalized afterwards Swiss and American. He is considered as the best-known and most popular scientist of the 20th century.
In 1905, when he was an unknown young physicist, employed in the Patent Office of Berne, he published his theory of special relativity.
In 1915 he presented the theory of general relativity, in which he completely reformulated the concept of gravity.

George Washington

He was the first President of the United States between 1789 and 1797 and Commander in Chief of the revolutionary Continental Army in the War of Independence of the United States (1775-1783).
In the United States he is considered the Father of the Fatherland.

Christopher Columbus

He was a navigator, cartographer, admiral, viceroy and general governor of the West Indies in the service of the Crown of Castile.
It is famous for having made the discovery of America, on October 12, 1492, when arriving at the island of Guanahani, currently in The Bahamas.

Isaac Newton

He was a physicist, philosopher, theologian, inventor, alchemist and English mathematician.
He is the author of the Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica, better known as the Principia, where he describes the law of universal gravitation and laid the foundations of classical mechanics by means of laws bearing his name.

Sigmund Freud

He was an Austrian neurologist doctor of Jewish origin, father of psychoanalysis and one of the greatest intellectual figures of the twentieth century.
Despite the hostility of his revolutionary theories and hypotheses, Freud would eventually become one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.
Many limit their contribution to the field of thought and culture in general, and there is a wide debate about whether or not psychoanalysis belongs to the field of science.

Louis Pasteur

It was a French chemist whose discoveries were of great importance in various fields of the natural sciences.
He is responsible for the technique known as pasteurization.
He definitively refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and developed the germ theory of infectious diseases.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

He was an Austrian composer and pianist, master of Classicism, considered one of the most influential and outstanding musicians in history.
The Mozartian work encompasses all musical genres and includes over six hundred creations, mostly recognized as masterpieces of symphonic, concertante, chamber music, piano, opera and choral, achieving universal popularity and dissemination.

Archimedes

He was a Greek physicist, engineer, inventor, astronomer and mathematician.
He is considered one of the most important scientists of classical antiquity.
Among its advances in physics are its fundamentals in hydrostatic, static and the explanation of the principle of the lever.

Galileo Galilei

He was an Italian astronomer, philosopher, engineer, mathematician and physicist, closely related to the scientific revolution.
His achievements include the improvement of the telescope, a great variety of astronomical observations, the first law of the movement and a decisive support for Copernicanism.
He has been regarded as the"father of modern astronomy,"the"father of modern physics,"and the"father of science"

Jesus of Nazareth

Also known as Jesus, Christ or Jesus Christ, he is the central figure of Christianity and one of the most influential of Western culture.
He is probably the most studied religious person in the history of mankind.
The religious movement that began was transformed into a new religion, Christianity, which currently has more than 2100 million Christians.

Muhammad

He was the founding prophet of Islam.
Muhammad is considered"the seal of the prophets"for being the last of a long chain of messengers sent by God to update his message
It is estimated that there are currently 1157 million followers of Islam

Buddha Gautama

He was a sage in whose teachings Buddhism was founded.
Due to certain common misconceptions, it should be emphasized that the Gautama Buddha is not a god.
Traditional biographies on Siddhartha Gautama generally include numerous miracles, prophecies, and supernatural events.
Buddhism has about 500 million practitioners.

Alexander the Great

He was the king of Macedonia from 336 BC. C. until his death.
In his 13-year reign, he completely changed the political and cultural structure of the area by conquering the Achaemenid Empire and starting an era of extraordinary cultural exchange, in which the Greeks expanded through the Mediterranean and the surrounding areas.

Michelangelo

He was an Italian Renaissance architect, sculptor and painter, considered one of the greatest artists in history for both his sculptures and his paintings and architectural work.
He triumphed in all the arts in which he worked, characterized by his perfectionism.

Mahatma Gandhi

He was an Indian Hindu lawyer, thinker and politician.
Once gained independence, Gandhi tried to reform Indian society, starting with integrating the lower castes, and developing rural areas.

Nelson Mandela

He was an anti-apartheid activist, politician and philanthropist who served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
His government was dedicated to dismantling the social and political structure inherited from apartheid through the fight against institutionalized racism, poverty and social inequality, and the promotion of social reconciliation.

Abraham Lincoln

He was an American politician, sixteenth president of the United States and first by the Republican Party.
During his time, he helped preserve the United States for the defeat of the Confederate States of America secessionists in the American Civil War.
It introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, with the issuance of its Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the promotion of the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.

Martin Luther King

He was an American pastor of the Baptist church who developed a crucial work in the United States at the head of the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans and also participated as an activist in numerous protests against the Vietnam War and poverty in general.

Thomas Alva Edison

He was an entrepreneur and a prolific American inventor who patented more than a thousand inventions.
It contributed to give both the United States and Europe the technological profiles of the contemporary world: the electrical industries, a viable telephone system, the phonograph, films, etc.

Nikola Tesla

He was an inventor, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer and physicist of Serbian origin. It is considered to be the most important promoter of the birth of commercial electricity.
He is known, above all, for his numerous and revolutionary inventions in the field of electromagnetism, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Johannes Gutenberg

He was a German goldsmith, inventor of the printing of modern movable types.

Pythagoras

He was a Greek philosopher and mathematician considered the first pure mathematician.
He contributed significantly to the advance of Greek mathematics, geometry and arithmetic, derived particularly from numerical relations, and applied, for example, to the theory of weights and measures, to music theory, or to astronomy.

Marie Curie

It was a Polish physics, mathematics and chemistry, nationalized French.
Pioneer in the field of radioactivity, was, among other merits, the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes in different specialties, Physics and Chemistry, and the first woman to be a professor at the University of Paris.

Ludwig van Beethoven

He was a composer, conductor and German pianist.
He is one of the most important composers of the history of the music and its legacy has influenced decisively in the music later.
His musical legacy covers, chronologically, from the classic period until the beginnings of musical romanticism.

Genghis Khan

He was a Mongol warrior and conqueror who unified the nomadic tribes of this ethnic group from North Asia, founding the first Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in history.
Under his leadership as the Great Khan, the Mongols began a wave of conquests that extended their dominion to a vast territory, from Eastern Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and from Siberia to Mesopotamia, India and Indochina.

Karl Marx

He was a philosopher, intellectual and German communist militant of Jewish origin.
In his vast and influential work, he ventured into the fields of philosophy, history, political science, sociology and economics.
Together with Friedrich Engels, he is the father of scientific socialism, modern communism, Marxism and historical materialism.

Wright Brothers

They are named together and known worldwide for being pioneers in the history of aviation.

Confucius

He was a renowned Chinese thinker whose doctrine is called Confucianism.
His ideas were based on a spiritual inheritance which the school of the ruled, and more specifically Confucius itself, had sublimely compiled and systematized.

Nicolaus Copernicus

He was a Renaissance astronomer who formulated the heliocentric theory of the Solar System, conceived in the first instance by Aristarchus of Samos.

Bill Gates

Bill gates phrases

He is an American businessman, computer scientist and philanthropist, co-founder of the software company Microsoft along with Paul Allen.

Henry Ford

He was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern production chains used for mass production.

Lenin

He was a politician, revolutionary, political theorist and Russian communist.
Leader of the Bolshevik sector of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, he became the main leader of the October Revolution of 1917.

Mao Zedong

He was the top leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the People's Republic of China.

Under his leadership, the Communist Party seized power in mainland China in 1949, when the new People's Republic was proclaimed after the victory in the Civil War against the forces of the Republic of China.

Adolf Hitler

He brought to power the German National Socialist Workers' Party or Nazi Party, and led a totalitarian regime during the period known as the Third Reich or Nazi Germany.
He directed Germany during World War II, initiated by him with the main purpose of fulfilling his expansionist plans in Europe.
Under Hitler's leadership, German forces and their allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa in 1941.
Hitler was the cause of the deaths of seventeen million people, including six million Jews and between half and a million and a half Gypsies, in what was later called the"Holocaust."

What characters do you think are missing? I am interested in your opinion. Thanks!

The 40 Most Important Historical Characters

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