In a triumph of collective action, commenters have now managed to identify all of the personal heroes in my portrait gallery, either in comments to the original post or to the followup. For those who would like to check their answers, here is the gallery again, with full captions. After all the pictures, I’ve attached some brief commentary explaining who’s who and why some of these people are here. I’ll write in more detail about some of them over the coming weeks.
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| Archimedes | William Shakespeare | John Donne |
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| Rene Descartes | Galileo Galilei | Pierre de Fermat |
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| Isaac Newton | Benjamin Franklin | Leonhard Euler |
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| David Hume | Thomas Jefferson | David Ricardo |
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| Carl Friedrich Gauss | Frederic Bastiat | Abraham Lincoln |
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| Harriet Tubman | Arthur Cayley | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
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| James Clerk Maxwell | Gerard Manley Hopkins | David Hilbert |
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| William Butler Yeats | Albert Einstein | Emmy Noether |
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| Neils Bohr | The Marx Brothers | Erwin Schrodinger |
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| T.S. Eliot | Cole Porter | Winston Churchill |
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| Werner Heisenberg | Paul Dirac | Henri Cartan |
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| Andre Weil | Saunders MacLane | Johnny Mercer |
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| Ronald Reagan | Milton Friedman | Chuck Jones |
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| Sammy Eilenberg | Dylan Thomas | Frank Sinatra |
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| Robert Preston | Margaret Thatcher | Jean-Pierre Serre |
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| Alexandre Grothendieck | Sergio Leone | Clint Eastwood |
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| Stephen Sondheim | John Gardner | Robert Lucas |
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| Daniel Quillen | Richard Dawkins | Daniel Dennett |
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| Jerry Garcia | Martin Scorsese | James Heckman |
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| Lou and Peter Berryman | Steven Pinker | David Simon |
(Some listed more than once)
1) Mathematicians, pre-1900: Archimedes, Fermat, Newton, Euler, and Gauss are the giants. (If I could only hang one portrait on my wall, it would surely be Newton’s.) I also included Descartes, Cayley and Hilbert. You could well argue that, say, Riemann ranks higher than Cayley by some reasonably objective criterion, but this is a subjective list. Galois might have belonged here too.
2) Mathematicians, post-1900: Grothendieck is, I think, the single greatest mathematician of all time; the other mid-century titans are Serre, Weil and Henri Cartan. Emmy Noether, the mother of modern algebra and the prophet who was first to perceive and harness the full power of abstraction, was born in 1882 but goes in the post-1900 category because she was decades ahead of her time. I did not hesitate to include MacLane, Eilenberg and Quillen, though I might equally well have included Leray, Milnor, Weyl or Godel.
3) Physicists: The three titans are Newton, Maxwell and Einstein. Close behind are Galileo and the pioneers of quantum mechanics: Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Dirac. Emmy Noether made a little avocational foray into physics that could arguably have qualified her here even without counting her major life’s work.
4) Poets: Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Dylan Thomas are the modern poets who move me above all others. Going back to the classics we have Shakespeare and Donne. E.E. Cummings (not included) was a contender.
5) Statesmen: Franklin was extraordinary in an astonishing variety of ways; so was Jefferson. These were probably not hard to recognize; neither, I suppose was Lincoln or the three modern leaders: Reagan, Thatcher and Churchill. I might have included Ataturk if I knew more of the relevant history.
6) Philosophers: Descartes, Hume (here for philosophy more than for economics) and Dennett. I considered Bertrand Russell.
7) Economists: I omitted the two greatest economists of the 20th century (Arrow and Samuelson) because this is a personal list and I am more inspired by Ricardo, Friedman, Lucas and Heckman.
8) Popularizers: Bastiat, Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker and again Friedman.
9) Activists: The awesome Harriet Tubman is the only one here, though there were other contenders. Arguably Friedman counts in this category too.
10) Historians: Friedman, Hume, Churchill and Weil, though all were here for other reasons. I could conceivably have included Herodotus, Macaulay or Gibbon.
11) Novelists: Dostoevesky and John Gardner.
12) Entertainers: The Marx Brothers, Johnny Mercer, Frank Sinatra, Robert Preston, and the Berrymans. (Jerry Garcia is in the next category.)
13) Cultural phenomena: Jerry Garcia
14) Lyricists: Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Stephen Sondheim and Peter Berryman.
15) Composers: Sondheim makes the list for his lyrics alone and then he makes it again for his music alone.
16) Directors: Chuck Jones, Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, David Simon
And now I ask once again: Who is on your list?
Among others … Bill James.
I included Bill James’ photo, but I guess html isn’t allowed. :(
It’s not easy compiling a list on demand. This is gonna require some actual thought and reflection. Totally worthwhile though!
It is such a relief that Rousseau is not in there that I forget the shame of confusing him with Euler, or von Neumann with Johnny Mercer. Never mind that I confused John Donne with John Napier: all Elizabethan gentlemen look the same to me. I admit that David Simon reminded me of Steve Ballmer, but I was far from sure.
Most of the people in categories 12 to 15 are unknown to me, as I hardly ever listen to singing (except for Viking songs). BTW in category 16, Scorsese’s name is misspelled.
As for mathematicians, obviously I have a much more pragmatic approach to it: I admire Brahmagupta because I use the “Arabic” numerals; Simon Stevin, because I use the decimal point; Viete and Galileo, because I use the algebraic notation; Newton, because I use calculus and the Newton method; Grassmann, because I use linear algebra; Pascal, Cardano, etc because I use statistics; Turing and von Neumann because I use computers; and so on. [NB: I am quite aware that these people built on previous work, and that they did not leave a finished product.]
Nikola Tesla
Jules Verne
Gregor Mendel
Led Zepplin (Plant, Page, Bonham, and John Paul Jones)
Beatrix Potter
Richard Scarry
Leo Lionni
Ezra Jack Keats
my mum and my pop (without whom, my existence would be improbable)
Aldo Leopold
Theodore Roosevelt
John Muir
it wouldnt hurt to leave a blank spot.
I thought I got all the poets; I’m upset I missed Donne!
Here’s my list, only including people who didn’t make yours:
King Sejong (of Korea)
John Keats
GK Chesterton
Kurt Goedel
Vladimir Nabokov
Woody Allen
Snorri: I’ve fixed the spelling of Scorsese. Thanks for carching this, and for all your other input.
Thomas Bayes
Leonardo da Vinci
Robert Burns
Adam Smith
Calvin Coolidge
Grover Cleveland
Jackie Robinson
Jim Elliot
Eric Liddell
Hudson Taylor
David Brainerd
Athanasius of Alexandria
Augustine of Hippo
John Calvin
John Knox
John Wycliffe
John Bunyan
Johnathan Edwards
Alexandre Dumas
JRR Tolkien
CS Lewis
I’d put two that rarely appear on such lists.
Henry George — world famous political economist in the late 19th century, but practically unknown afterward. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George
And Rosalind Franklin, who should have shared the Nobel Prize with Crick and Watson, but died of cancer at 37. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
Well, one that definitely couldn’t be out of my list would be Karl Marx, but I suppose he is not high on your list.
Others:
Max Weber
Adam Smith
David Ricardo
Robert Solow
John M. Keynes
Joseph Schumpeter
etc.
For 20th Century Economists, I might add:
Joseph Schumpeter
Ronald Coase
George Stigler
For Composers:
Dave Brubeck
Miles Davis
Richard Feynman
In no particular order but somewhat classified:
Deep Thinkers
1. Joseph Schumpeter
2. Ilya Prigogine
3. Christian de Duve
4. Henri Poincaré
Music
5. Johann Sebastian Bach
6. Manuel de Falla
7. Andres Segovia
8. Louis Armstrong
9. BB King
10. David Gilmour
Entertainment
11. Chuck Jones (thanks Prof., I might have forgotten him, but yes, huge early influence!)
12. Woody Allen
13. George Carlin
Art
14. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
15. Richard Diebenkorn
16. Henri Cartier-Bresson
I’ll use your categories and only list those that aren’t on your list:
1) Bernhardt Riemann, Karl Weierstrass
2) Alan Turing, Kurt Goedel
3) Wolfgang Pauli
4) Zbigniew Herbert (A Polish poet; I’m Polish)
6) Bertrand Russell
7) John Harsanyi (to me, he’s the most glaring absence on your list)
11) Charles Dickens, Ian McEwan
15) Frederic Chopin
I don’t know enough about the other categories to even have a list there.
Lincoln is on a different list I have: People Who Caused the Most Unnecessary Deaths. Trust me, it is an ugly list.
It is a disgrace to the other 56 people on the list above to be next to The Great Murderer.
> Richard Feynman
Surely you’re joking! :)
He’d rank highly on my list as well.
My tastes in mathematics are more tuned to the geometric and computational rather than abstract. I also have a great affinity for people that can explain difficult problems clearly (actually you fit into this category).
V.I Arnold – Brilliant mathematician with great communication skills
Felix Klein – Same
Gilbert Strang – His lectures on MIT OCW are worth listening to
Other Science/Math/Tech people I admire
Linus Torvalds – Free software, with no distain for capitalism
Richard Feynman – Incredibly creative, entertaining, great educator
Lewis Fry Richardson – Chose his own path, deserves to be better known
I don’t have a great deal of expertise in the arts but the two greatest composers of all time.
JS Bach
W Mozart
I agree with ScottN that Lincoln doesn’t belong on any list of great people. He was a tyrant and a racist to boot. It would make his moral standing higher if he arrested legislatures, suspended habeus and caused as much American death as anyone in history if it was to end slavery. But it wasn’t, it was to “Preserve the union”, or “Keep southerners paying tariffs to support the Northern states” as was his real intention. Lysander Spooner would have been a better choice for an abolitionist, as would Fredrick Douglas.
Possibly the only President I would include in the list is
Grover Cleveland – Great Classical liberal, only one elected to two nonconsecutive terms.
So I have to ask, did you name your daughter after Arthur Cayley?
She’s lucky it wasn’t Hilbert…
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Hayek. Spontaneous order, emergence, the knowledge problem, the epistemology of economics, the heterogeneity of capital, the importance of instinct and intuition, as well asinstitutions and tradition when it comes to solving coordination problems. I find these insights truly inspiring – how about you?
Another hero of mine which people reading this blog will probably like is Copernicus. Wikipedia describes him as
mathematician, astronomer, physician, quadrilingual polyglot, classical scholar, translator, artist, Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist.
As an economist, he was the first to come up with the quantity theory of money:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetae_cudendae_ratio
If you don’t trust wikipedia, he is also mentioned here:
http://homepage.newschool.edu/het//schools/salamanca.htm
Bertrand Russell definitely should have beaten out Dennett. There’s no comparison.
I would have included Orson Welles in the director category. He was the best. Plus, he transcends that category, given his work in radio (don’t forget about his War-of-the-Worlds broadcast and the impact that had on the nation) and theater (voodoo Macbeth, gangster Julius Caesar). And even in his movies, you can see examples of his paintings and craftsmanship. Citizen Cane is widely considered the greatest movie ever made, for good reason. Plus, check out is brilliant interviews on Youtube. He was a master at the interview and at storytelling.
Why not include Richard Feynman? He made major contributions to Quantum Physics, including inventing methodological tools that are still used. But what truly makes him great are his insightful and hilarious anecdotes, which have found a broad audience. (His books are big sellers, unlike, say, Einstein’s. People only read about Einstein; they don’t read his actual words.) These anecdotes show how anyone can do physics in everyday life without fancy equipment – just a little curiosity and a willingness to experiment. Finally, he’s a really cool-looking guy. Your wall needs that.
By the way, I think I deserve some credit for being the first (perhaps the only?) one to point out that Henri Cartan was misidentified as Friedrich Hayek. Sure, I didn’t identify him, but I figured out that his image was not that of Hayek.
Lastly, how could you entirely ignore prominent intellectual figures from the judiciary? I have in mind here Richard Posner. He has been a hugely important figure in the legal community; although Coase deserves much credit for his role in starting the influential Law and Economics Movement, it was really Posner who built the field with his ground breaking, “Economic Analysis of the Law.” Furthermore, he has had a tremendous impact on economic theory. A study just came out in the last few days ranking the most influential economic bloggers in terms of scholarly impact, and he was ranked number 3! Not bad for a judge.
For the study results, see http://www.palgrave-journals.com/eej/journal/v36/n1/full/eej200946a.html.
Aesop, for the greatest short lesson in economics; The Goose Who Laid the Golden Eggs.
Hans Christian Anderson, for perhaps the most enduring political insight; The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Schiller; the only writer to come anywhere near Shakespeare with The Wallenstein Trilogy.
George Gershwin must make the popular artist list. As would Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby (a surprisingly good actor too).
Steven Landsburg!
One more: Pinker is the best psychologist you have up there, and he’d make my wall. But William James is hands-down best psychologist ever.
Steve,
If you’re still reading, I would love to hear your reasons for including Lincoln. I have the same misgivings as the other commenter above, though I was going to introduce them with levity. (E.g. “I know you like math, Steve, so is that why you included the guy who maximized the wartime deaths of Americans?”)
Don’t get me wrong, I grew up thinking Lincoln was great, just as I thought FDR was great. But when I actually started thinking about things (a la your bathtub drain), I realized: “Wait a second, doesn’t ‘he saved the Union’ describe the same behavior that King George engaged in when the colonists decided to split?”