15 of the Most Influential People in History

Jesus Christ is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion, with roughly 2.4 billion followers today.

Muhammad is regarded by Muslims as the last prophet of Islam; the Quran, Islam's central religious text, is believed to be the record of revelations he received.

Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, lived around the 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism after reaching enlightenment through meditation.

Confucius was a Chinese philosopher and teacher whose ideas on ethics, family duty, and social order shaped Chinese culture and government for more than 2,000 years.

Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great and wrote foundational works on logic, biology, ethics, and politics that shaped Western philosophy for centuries.

Isaac Newton's 1687 book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica introduced the laws of motion and universal gravitation, laying the foundation of classical physics.

Galileo Galilei improved the telescope and used it to support the Copernican, sun-centered model of the solar system, a stance that led the Roman Inquisition to place him under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Thomas Edison held more than 1,000 U.S. patents, including practical designs for the phonograph and a long-lasting incandescent light bulb.

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, published in the early 20th century, transformed the understanding of space, time, and gravity, and he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Johannes Gutenberg introduced Europe's first mechanical movable-type printing press around 1440, dramatically speeding up the production of books and spreading literacy across the continent.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for opposing apartheid before becoming South Africa's first Black president in 1994.

Mahatma Gandhi led a nonviolent independence movement that helped India gain freedom from British rule in 1947, influencing later civil rights movements worldwide.

Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.

Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech at the March on Washington in 1963 and later received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his nonviolent fight against racial segregation.

Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species introduced the theory of evolution by natural selection, transforming the field of biology.

Aristotle's writings survived largely because they were preserved and translated by Islamic scholars during the Middle Ages before returning to Europe.

Marie Curie's research on radioactivity, a term she coined, led to the discovery of the elements polonium and radium.

Gutenberg's printing press made the Bible one of the first mass-produced books in Europe, with roughly 180 copies of his 42-line Bible printed around 1455.