This list is a work in progress

(470-399) Socrates created the Socratic method, a dialectic method of inquiry, largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts. The most important source of information about Socrates is Plato. Plato's dialogues portray Socrates as a teacher who denies having disciples, as a man of reason who obeys a divine voice in his head, and a pious man who is executed for the state's own expediency. Socrates disparages the pleasures of the senses, yet is excited by beauty; he is devoted to the education of the citizens of Athens, yet indifferent to his own sons. He is often held to be the founder of Western philosophy, and its most influential practitioner.

The trial and execution of Socrates was the climax of his career and the central event of the dialogues of Plato. According to Plato, both were unnecessary. Socrates admits in court that he could have avoided the trial by abandoning philosophy and going home to mind his own business. After his conviction, he could have avoided the death penalty by escaping with the help of his friends. The reason for his cooperation with the state's mandate forms a valuable philosophical insight in its own right, and is best articulated by the dialogues themselves, especially in his dialogue with Crito.

(427-347) Plato, a student of Socrates and founder of the Academy in Athens where Aristotle studied. He was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues.

(384-322) Aristotle , a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His conception of logic was the dominant form of logic up until the advances in mathematical logic in the 19th century.

(1473-1543) Nicolaus Copernicus the sun (rather than the Earth) is the center of the solar system. While the heliocentric theory had been formulated by Indian, Greek and Muslim savants centuries before Copernicus, his reiteration that the sun (rather than the Earth) is at the center of the solar system is considered among the most important landmarks in the history of western science.

(1564-1642) Galileo Galilei the father of modern astronomy, modern physics, and science. His work is considered to be a significant break from that of Aristotle. His achievements include the first systematic studies of uniformly accelerated motion, improvements to the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism.

(1770-1831) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher that introduced, arguably for the first time in philosophy, the idea that History and the concrete are important in getting out of the circle of philosophia perennis, i.e., the perennial problems of philosophy. He was the first one in the history of philosophy that realized the importance of the Other in the coming to be of self-consciousness (Slave-master dialectic).

(1818-1883) Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. Marx addressed a wide range of issues; he is most famous for his analysis of history, summed up in the opening line of the introduction to the Communist Manifesto (1848): "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Marx believed that capitalism would be replaced by communism.

Marx was both a scholar and a political activist, often called the father of communism. Sometimes, he argued that his analysis of capitalism revealed that capitalism was destined to end because of unsolvable problems within capitalism: "The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

Other times, he argued that capitalism would end through the organized actions of an international working class: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

(1809–1882) Charles Robert Darwin is famed as the eminent English naturalist who presented a mass of evidence which persuaded the scientific community that species develop over time from a common origin. His theories explaining this phenomenon through natural and sexual selection are central to the modern understanding of evolution as the unifying theory of the life sciences, essential in biology and important in other disciplines such as anthropology, psychology and philosophy.

His 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, established evolution by common descent as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. Human origins and features without obvious utility such as beautiful bird plumage were examined in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

(1879-1955) Albert Einstein his theory of relativity makes him one of the greatest physicists of all time.

(1903-1950), George Orwell, was a British author and journalist that is best known for two novels critical of fascism, stalinism and totalitarianism written and published towards the end of his life: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

(1904-1990) "B. F." Skinner understood behavior as a function of environmental histories of experiencing consequences.

(1912-1954) Alan Mathison Turing the father of modern computer science that provided the Turing Test, a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to perform human-like conversation