Awwww man...questions like this are damn near impossible to answer. The list will be weighted toward the post-Industrial Revolution for obvious reasons.

All yours (except Lawrence Durrell, I gotta go look him up now) plus:

• Ken Keyes
• Rachel Carson
• John Lennon
• Mathew Brady
• and reluctantly do I add P.T. Barnum (for pointing out the achilles heel of capitalism)

Looking forward to seeing the results,
Meredith
--
PintSize Graphics & Web Hosting, Inc.
http://www.pintsize.com/

"Contribute to others, rather than converting others." -- HH Dalai Lama

Yeah, add him too.


From RIC WILLIAMS, AUSTIN, TX, USA :

That's Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre.

And where's de Sade? Remember when we talked about Benjamin Franklin versus de Sade?

Ten, huh? That's a tall order. These are broad and generalized assessments and not in chronological order.

Francis of Assisi (saved Christianity and the invisible--good or bad?) Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr. fall under his aegis

Adolph Hitler (showed us the depths of human evil) Genghis Khan, etc.

Descartes (primary author of Western rationalistic dualism)--Hume nailed the mother and Wittgenstein walked away from the grave, but Descartes is still the name for philosophers and scientists, Newton et al.

Freud (showed us the myth of rationalism was a delicate myth)--I prefer Jung, even Adler, and the gods bless James Hillman, but Freud started it in the popular mind though he stole most of his material; even Madonna and Presley fall under Freud's shadow--the whole deconstruction thing starts here and the appreciation of the Other (which encompasses my obvious lacunae regarding other cultural heroes); yes, he was strongly influenced by Goethe and the Romantics which brings us to the next two

Elizabeth I (that Woman Rules) so many strong women proving it wasn't a man's world and that an individual's personal power matters, but her name sums it up

Shakespeare (people still actually read Shakespeare as opposed to Dante) What a piece of work speech was spoken to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern--wow!

Michelangelo/da Vinci (those two--the finger of God and the smile of a woman) Picasso, Matisse, Warhol, but those two are still the ones to measure by--I know it's a fudge but I had to have one

Adam Smith (Jefferson and Marx battle it out, but for some reason Adam Smith still holds the bottom line)

Mozart (music is divine; the mystery of genius) Beethoven, Bach John Lennon (sums up the Western complex: his life encapsulates all of the above; my personal hero)

P.S. - Darwin would have to make the list as part of the Marx, Freud, Darwin holy trinity of liberal thought. Again, like Marx falling under Smith via Hegel under Descartes, he could be a subset, but Darwin is big. The interdependency of these forces becomes apparent when you play this game seriously.

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From KEVIN CAREY, London, UK :

Here are my ten:

• Bach - Foundations of formal structured western music
• Keppler - Astronomy
• Vico - Historiography, an understanding of ourselves
• Darwin - Biology
• Shakespeare - Literature
• Eisenstein - Cinematography Ý
• Turing - Computing
• Newton - Physics
• Rembrandt - Light in painting
• Einstein - Physics Ý

Oh dear, not an American in sight!Ý And only three from this century. Ý

The runners up who didn't quite make it were:

• Leibnitz: Polymath,
• Chomsky: Linguistics (an American),
• Spinoza: Philosophy,
• Kant: Philosophy. Ý

I am pesonally very devoted to the work of Thomas Aquinas but as it derives almost exclusively from scripture and Aristotle he doesn't quite fit into this millennium as he is derivative; on this basis I would also classify Maimonidez. Ý Ý


From JURATE MACNORUITE, Vilnius, LITHUANIA :

Those who have affected personally my life and thinking are much more than ten. I'm thinking that among those ten can be

• Leonardo da Vinci,
• Rembrandt van Rijn,
• Aleksandr Ivanov,
• Fiodor Dostojevsky,
• Franz Kafka,
• Bertrand Russell,
• Rudolf Arnheim,
• Algirdas Julius Greimas,
• Johann Sebastian Bach,
• Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (C with bird).

Regards,
Jurate


From LARRY KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA:

How can you leave out Aldus Huxley & Jerry Garcia? Then I start thinking:

• Brian Ferry,
• Donald Fagan,
• Van Morrison,
• Jim Morrison,
• John Lennon,
• Sir Paul... those last two sure changed music forever...

The TEN-MOST of the MILLENIUM

As usual, what looks easy to start with gets more and more difficult and complicated. I have begun to assemble the TEN-MOST of the MILLENIUM.

The first four are relatively easy, in no particular order of priority:

• Francesco Petrarcha (1304-1374), who brought attention to the ancient world and ancient texts at a time when their remnants could be saved. And had he not done so, many more would surely have been lost. A distant second might be Gibbon and his Decline and Fall, were it not such an opinionated piece of propaganda.
• Johann Gutenberg (1397-1458) either alone or with his partner Scheffer took the stamping of images on paper or fabric and turned it into what we know as printing His was not a single invention but a congeries of inventions, including the type and the press and the ink and the case and more.
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616) together with the Bible translators who gave us the Authorized King James Version brought the world not only wondrous literature, but a language of endless beauty and expression that sings and declaims and resonates through centuries of further development.
• Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), both for his virtuosity and for his compositions brought musical expression to a height that has not yet diminished in two hundred fifty years. He brought comfort to the grieving, a sense of the divine to those who seek God, and an artistic challenge to any who would dare interpret his notes.

Now it begins to become more difficult, as we must be more selective.

• For number five, among Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), Darwin has stood out as the most imaginative and at the same time the most scientific. Darwin has also had the most impact outside his narrow field of interest.
• Sixth, Isaac Newton (1643-1727), Albert Einstein (1879-1952) and Niels Bohr (1885-1962) offer another trilogy that presents tremendous problems of selection, but one would probably have to cite Einstein again for the double whammy: he saw imaginatively a new physics and he had so very much impact outside his field of physics.
• In seventh place, one might trouble oneself with a trilogy of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), Henry Ford (1863-1947), and someone like Prosper Eckert and/or John Mauchly but with closer examination only Edison makes the grade as a man of the millenium. The others are great men of their century.
• For eight, among Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274), Martin Luther (1483-1546), and Pope John XXIII (1881-1963), each a man of his century, it is not hard to come up with these three in one set, but choosing one, that's tough.

  I suspect it would have to be Martin Luther,again for what he did, not only as a Reformer, but also as a propagandist and politician.

  Ah, but Papa Joannes would probably have been happy to die Angelo Roncalli, had God not had other ideas for him. Maybe a tie?

• Number nine, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) is the easier choice for an American, over Mahatma Gandhi (or Mohandas, as he preferred) (1869-1948).

Were we from India, we would probably chose the other. That is OK by me.

And why M. L. King, Jr.? Because he saw the problem, he told us about the problem, then he helped us all work on solving the problem. A major achievement.

So far, no political leaders, no athletes, no one from the field of medicine, or biochemistry, or psychology. One more dip into the pool.

Ten, number ten, there are beginning to be so many, too many to chose from. I need to put one more name on the end of this list, but I have large clusters of names, not a single person.

I am putting aside the likes of Karl Marx, Christopher Columbus, Jonas Salk, Thomas Jefferson.

If we have to think of sheer numbers of humans, it would have to be Chairman Mao.

But I am trying to make it my list, not a world list.

It might be Michelangelo, but that becomes too personal. But if we are going to be personal, then it will have to be Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), because he saw the entirety of enclosure, of protection from the elements, including the furnishings and the windows, the lamps and the floor surfaces, the gross shape and the smallest decorative pattern -- all of them part of the one, of the unity of architecture. No architect saw the one and the unity and learned to express the one and the unity with such beauty as well as FLW, even though he could not build a roof that did not leak.

Ah, but now my list is so unbalanced: no one from the eleventh, twelfth or thirteenth centuries. Then one each from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. And then four from the twentieth? Oh, come on! This is terribly lopsided. Let's start over.

Ronald E. Diener
Raleigh (moving to Wendell), North Carolina


From BOB POWERS, Marietta, OH, USA:

A Contribution to the Millennium Poll

Music comforts. Music raises one's spirits. Music provides a blueprint for life. Music delights babies, thrills grade school youngsters, and promotes the release of inhibitions for teens, not that this is such a good thing. When we become adults, music is our companion on the highway, our refuge from life's disappointments. Music has the ability to boost energy, comfort us in the face of the inevitable tragedies of life.

My choices, therefore, are musicians.

In no particular order, these are the magic makers who stir my soul:

• Rosemary Clooney
• Van Morrison
• Sinead O'Connor
• Alanis Morissette
• Charlie Parker
• Stan Kenton
• Duke Ellington
• Woody Herman
• Count Basie
• The Beatles

All of the above cause the same reaction: they make me cry over the sheer wonder of their talents. Only four of the above have I seen perform in person: Rosemary Clooney (more than a dozen times in the past two decades), Count Basie (I caught his masterful band live four times), Stan Kenton, a giant of a musician who led one of the best jazz groups ever created (I saw them four times and once even rode on the Kenton bus from an amusement park where they'd done a concert back to their hotel in downtown Cincinnati), and Woody Herman (I witnessed at least three incarnations of the clarinet-playing leader's famous Herds.)

Music has been used for good and for bad. When it's employed for the right motives, it becomes arguably our best avenue to make our occasional miserable lives worthwhile.


From JEFF WINBUSH, Columbus, OH, USA:

Here's a top ten for ya... Ý

10.ÝRichard Pryor
9.ÝMiles Davis
8.ÝMuhammad ALI
7. Albert Einstein
6.ÝChief Justice Earl Warren
5. Rosa Parks
4.ÝLangston Hughes
3.ÝMarlon Brando
2.ÝFranklin Delano Roosevelt
1.Martin Luther King Jr.

peace out
jw


From L.LARSON, (NO CITY PROVIDED,) USA:

1. Kennedy (made people feel something)
2. Stephen King (made people who don't read something)
3. Elvis Presley (made women want sex)
4. Winston Churchill (made the war seem dramatic)
5. Marylyn Monroe (made being dumb an asset)
6. Jesse Owens (made being a Native American important)
7. Martin Luther King (made people think about race issues)
8. Jim Henson (made little kids and adults talk to artificial pets, as precursor to AI)
9. Madonna (showed people you can do anything if you have talent and live to do again)
10. Dali Lama (made people understand Eastern Religion)

so Don't ask me why.


From FELICITY USSHER, London, UK:

This is a bit of a cop out, but I can only think of two "famous" people who would be my people of the millennium. They are Kurt Vonnegut and Jorge Luis Borges - both have made a huge difference to my life - and still do, every time I pick up their work.

The other eight would be people no-one else has heard of - chance encounters with people who have shown me a new way of living. And the thing is, as we grow wiser, those people change too, because we need to learn new lessons. They are always the last eight fascinating people we have met.

Nine times out of ten, people mean end of the century - or even end of the decade or end of the year. They're not assessing the significance of 1,000 years. But they call it "end of the millennium" to make their comment sound more significant. especially the marketeers, not that that's surprising. If we're looking at 1,000 years, I'd probably add Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, Elizabeth I - still trying to choose people whose existence has affected my life.


ROD'S NOTES & PICKS: Very obviously, as I mentioned in the e-mail to the members of the G21 List, this is a parlour game. At best, reducing the last thousand years to only ten people is sophistry, at worst it is gross injustice.

But we all like playing these games. It's a way of focusing on the influences of our lives, not to mention our personal mythologies.

I found it immensely informative and fun reading most of your choices. Then, this past Saturday, when I went over these posts with my assistant, Kevin Moore, we both decided that it would great fun to put together our own "definitive" list of the Top Ten. An hour and a half of discussion and debate ensued. We even amended our list of top ten categories three times.

And, you know what? That was the point of this game.

So thank you for taking part and sharing your insights with me. (I now feel the question for the November Readership Poll will be a chore.)

Please don't feel like what follows is the Voice from Olympus. It's just a game.

My final list (categories included) --- with significant kibbitzing from my assistant:

• MATH/PHYSICS: Albert Einstein. Though Newton is the father of "classical" physics, Einstein set the paradigm for all we understand about the Universe today.
• MUSIC: Ludwig von Beethoven. Again this was a tough decision. But Beethoven could be considered the Father of Popular Music in that he brought *emotion* to the classical idiom of the West like no other composer. He made music secular and human. No matter what genre of popular music you look to, from rock n' roll to jazz to modern classical, they all owe a debt to Beethoven.
• SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: There were many influences, and we even considered William James. But the influence of Sigmund Freud on the life of modern man was undeniable. Jung and Neumann tried, but they are dwarfed by the master.
• LITERATURE: Yes, certainly, as I said in my e-mail, we can mention Dante, Chaucer, Miller, but William Shakespeare remains the defining writer of the Millennium.
• RELIGION: St. Thomas Aquinas brought Aristotilian models into the modern era. All religious writing and philosophy since has been for or against Aguinas's theses.
• POLITICS: It came to us in a burst of inspiration! Any list of millennial people that does not include Johannes Gutenberg is a flawed list. Why did we place him under politics? You would not be reading this Web site without Gutenberg. Education would not have become more universal in any country without the printing press. And Gutenberg, more than any figure in the last thousand years, made the poltical personal when he produced the technology that put The Words in our hands.
• "RENAISANCE MAN" - We chose to create a special category of the millennial individuals who covered more than one of the traditional categories dictated by specialization. Guess what? It didn't take us long to narrow it down to one person. Leonardo daVinci. Self-explanatory.
• EVIL - This is a category that both Kevin and I agreed, based on the bloodiness of the of this millennium MUST be considered if we look at human history today. Immediately, in our discussion, we saw that most readers of The World's Magazine would not agree with our final determination. Because of the events of this centuty, most people would immediately choose Adolph Hitler. Kev nominated Spain's infamous Inquisitor Torquemada. But believing in going for the source, my choice: Pope Gregory IX, the Father of the Inquisition.
• PARADIGM SHIFTER: Again, our discussion of the closing millennium lead us to believe that a special category was needed. Those people who turned the world on its head, "world-shakers," if you will. The names that immediately came to mind included Darwin, Gallileo, the framers of the Magna Carta, Martin Luther, Fermi, Copernicus. We agreed that we should stick to our tactic of focusing on the core. Darwin was a considerable contender, but he did not take the riskof Copernicus in changing humanity's view of its place in the Universe.
• HUMANITARIAN: Our tenth category was chosen based on the ideological stance of the G21. And it was the most problematic. Kev made a compelling case for both Mother Theresa and Mohandas Gandhi. I responded by citing the philosophical writings of Albert Schweitzer. In the end, this category was left solely to me without much discussion. When I looked at the millennium, one personality was preeminent: St Francis of Assisi.

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