Galt: Ayn Rand?
And which Heinlein? The incredibly liberal one he was in the early years, or the incredibly conservative one he was in his later years?
Okay, my list, not in any particular order and certainly incomplete...
Kant, for his ideas on justice;
Voltaire, More and Erasmus, for their contributions to the Enlightenment and Humanism;
Bhudda, for bhuddism (duh!);
Ghandi and King, for showing that force is not the only way to achieve your goals;
Galileo, for reasserting the place of experimentation over doctrine;
Russell, for the thoughts mentioned above;
Adams, for showing capitalism isn't a zero-sum game;
Hippocrates, for the code of ethics used by doctors;
Darwin, for evolutionary theory;
Harvey, for bringing experimentation and observation back to medicine;
Aristotle, for inventing sophistry and debate, along with the other great Greek philosophers;
Euclid, for codifying all of the mathematics of his day and providing a model for most of the rest of the mathematical world;
Bacon, for his contibutions to philosophy (hell, even for
Novum alone)
Einstein, for the concept of relativity;
Bohr and his contemporaries, for the concept of quantum mechanics;
Maxwell, just for his equations on electromechanics;
Marx, for modern communist theory;
Descartes, for his work on the fundamentals of modern philosophy;
The "founding fathers" for documents like the Bill of Rights and for founding a country on the principles of the Enlightenment - even if the last fifty years have been a sincere disaster...;
Gutenberg, Bell, Marconi and Berners-Lee for improving the speed of inter-human communication.
