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100 People You Should Know

A curated list of lesser-known but extraordinary thinkers, makers, and visionaries who shaped our world.

ART

Alma Thomas – African American abstractionist whose mosaic-like color fields radiate joy.

Hilma af Klint – Created abstract art before Kandinsky, but remained hidden for decades.

Lois Mailou Jones – Painter and educator who carried African diasporic aesthetics into modernism.

Amrita Sher-Gil – The “Indian Frida Kahlo,” a prodigy whose work merged East and West.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Minimalist whose conceptual pieces explore loss, queerness, and memory.

Florine Stettheimer – Whimsical American modernist long overshadowed by her male peers.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby – Nigerian visual artist blending collage, memory, and cultural hybridity.

Berthe Morisot – Impressionist master overlooked next to Monet and Renoir.

Leonora Carrington – Surrealist writer-painter whose mythic imagery shaped feminist surrealism.

Tarsila do Amaral – Brazilian modernist whose work defined an entire national style.

ARCHITECTURE

Zaha Hadid – Revolutionary architect, first woman to win the Pritzker Prize.

Lina Bo Bardi – Italian-Brazilian visionary behind São Paulo’s most iconic museum.

Chloé Nègre – Under-recognized interior architect reshaping French design.

Francis Kéré – Burkinabé architect, first African to win the Pritzker.

Tatiana Bilbao – Mexican architect advancing sustainable, equitable housing.

Fay Jones – American apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright whose chapels feel like sacred forests.

Minette de Silva – Sri Lankan modernist and pioneer of tropical modernism.

Kazuyo Sejima – Co-founder of SANAA, master of ethereal minimalism.

Norma Merrick Sklarek – First Black woman licensed as an architect in the U.S.

Anne Tyng – Geometric genius behind many of Louis Kahn’s signature forms.

MEDICINE & SCIENCE

Tu Youyou – Chinese scientist who discovered artemisinin, saving millions from malaria.

Chien-Shiung Wu – Experimental physicist who disproved a major law of nature but was denied a Nobel.

Patricia Bath – Ophthalmologist who invented laser cataract surgery.

May Edward Chinn – Physician who pioneered early cancer detection methods.

Alice Ball – Chemist who developed the first effective treatment for leprosy.

Ernest Everett Just – Cellular biologist whose discoveries advanced embryology.

Katalin Karikó – Mother of mRNA technology, foundation of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Maryam Mirzakhani – First woman to win the Fields Medal (in math, but for medical students she’s a must-know).

Rosalind Franklin – Crucial contributor to DNA discovery.

Ruth Benedict – Anthropologist whose work shaped cross-cultural medicine and public health.

SPORTS

Alice Coachman – First Black woman to win Olympic gold.

Tegla Loroupe – Kenyan marathoner and peace ambassador.

Wilma Rudolph – Overcame childhood paralysis to win three Olympic gold medals.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee – One of the greatest athletes in heptathlon history.

Kyla Ross – “The Machine,” under-recognized artistic gymnast with extraordinary consistency.

Lusia Harris – First and only woman officially drafted into the NBA.

Althea Gibson – Broke racial barriers in tennis long before Serena.

Eder Jofre – Brazilian boxer considered one of the all-time greats.

Toruń’s Irena Szewińska – The most decorated female Olympian in track history.

Fanny Blankers-Koen – Dutch athlete who won four Olympic golds as a mother of two.

LITERATURE

Buchi Emecheta – Nigerian novelist exploring womanhood, migration, resilience.

Clarice Lispector – Brazilian mystic-writer whose prose is almost spiritual.

Sigrid Undset – Nobel-winning Norwegian writer erased from mainstream reading lists.

Naguib Mahfouz – Egyptian novelist, first Arab author to win the Nobel Prize.

Jean Toomer – Harlem Renaissance writer behind Cane.

Yasunari Kawabata – Japanese stylist whose writing feels like silk.

Maria Dąbrowska – Polish novelist chronicling ordinary lives with extraordinary tenderness.

Gwendolyn Brooks – Poet of Black Chicago, Pulitzer winner.

Assia Djebar – Algerian writer documenting women’s lives during colonization.

Patrick Chamoiseau – Martinican writer behind the créolité movement.

POLITICS & SOCIAL CHANGE

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – Africa’s first female elected head of state.

Wangari Maathai – Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Shirley Chisholm – First Black woman elected to U.S. Congress.

Amina Wadud – Reformer and Islamic feminist scholar.

Thomas Sankara – Burkinabé revolutionary with a visionary social agenda.

Rigoberta Menchú – Indigenous Guatemalan activist and Nobel Prize winner.

Asma Jahangir – Pakistani human rights lawyer and UN rapporteur.

Nawal El Saadawi – Egyptian feminist and physician who challenged political orthodoxy.

Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir – Iceland’s first female prime minister.

Bayard Rustin – Architect of the March on Washington, often erased from the narrative.

LAW & JUSTICE

Constance Baker Motley – First Black woman federal judge; key strategist in Brown v. Board.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg – Need we say more?

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee – Chinese American suffragist excluded from citizenship laws.

Amal Clooney – International lawyer doing groundbreaking human rights work.

Dionne Searcey – Legal journalist exposing injustice in West Africa.

Louise Arbour – Former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Sandra Day O’Connor – First woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Kimberlé Crenshaw – Legal theorist who coined intersectionality.

Navanethem Pillay – South African jurist and former UN rights chief.

Felicitas Gómez Martínez de Méndez – Central plaintiff in Méndez v. Westminster (pre-Brown desegregation case).

MATHEMATICS

Katherine Johnson – NASA mathematician who helped send America to the moon.

Evelyn Boyd Granville – Second Black woman to earn a math PhD in the U.S.

Sofia Kovalevskaya – First major female mathematician in Europe.

Karen Uhlenbeck – Pioneering geometric analyst and Abel Prize winner.

Emmy Noether – The most important mathematician you’ve never been taught.

David Blackwell – Visionary in statistics and game theory.

Marjorie Rice – Homemaker-turned-mathematician who discovered new pentagonal tilings.

Mary Cartwright – One of the earliest contributors to chaos theory.

Shiing-Shen Chern – Giant in differential geometry.

Jill P. Mesirov – Mathematician in genomics and computational biology.

MUSIC

Florence Price – First Black woman to have a symphony played by a major orchestra.

Clara Schumann – Virtuoso pianist overshadowed by her husband.

William Grant Still – Composer known as the “Dean of African-American Music.”

Sister Rosetta Tharpe – The godmother of rock and roll.

Lili Boulanger – French prodigy composer who died young but changed music forever.

Fela Sowande – Father of Nigerian art music.

Teresa Carreño – Venezuelan piano virtuoso and composer.

Toru Takemitsu – Japanese composer who fused Western and Eastern soundscapes.

Barbara Strozzi – Baroque composer who published more than most of her male peers.

Julius Eastman – Radical minimalist composer rediscovered decades later.

FASHION

Ann Lowe – Black American designer who made Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress.

Elsa Schiaparelli – Surrealist couturier overshadowed by Coco Chanel.

Patrick Kelly – Mississippi-born trailblazer in Paris fashion.

Madame Grès – Master draper who revolutionized couture.

Warris Ahluwalia – Sikh designer bridging art, jewelry, and cinema.

Dapper Dan – Harlem icon who reshaped luxury streetwear.

Issey Miyake – Japanese designer behind modern pleating techniques.

Tina Leser – Pioneered global “world fashion” decades before others.

Oumou Sy – Senegalese designer merging couture with tradition.

Claire McCardell – Invented American sportswear as we know it.

Sun Wukong and Macaque are both extremely intelligent, just in different ways.

Sun Wukong is like canonically extremely intelligent. His literal title or name is “The Intelligent Stone Monkey”. To me, that means that he’s a problem solver and he’s good at EVERYTHING relating to cognitive abilities.

Like for instance, he can put two and two together and somehow create an entirely new formula for solving the unsolvable. He can figure out loopholes and leave escape rooms like no problem. He can solve any critical thinking tests with a perfect 100/100. He’s innovative and he learns through mimicry, which means if you give him a long enough time he can essentially do and learn ANYTHING.

Meanwhile, Macaque is the knowledgeable intellectual. He plans and thinks and he just KNOWS information. If you ask him how many books there are in the world, he’ll know because he’s omniscient. He knows what will happen and probably can ace any trivia game show. Macaque hears everything and he retains information, both good and bad. He’s amazing at recreating what’s been done. He passes on any and every test, knows all there is to know in the world, and knows what the past and present and future hold (or at least parts of them).

However, that’s where it ends. The difference between their levels of intellect is that while Macaque might be “smarter” at the start, Wukong can EVOLVE.

Wukong’s strength lies in his originality. In his creativity and inventiveness. Even if he doesn’t know how many books there are in the library, he could probably figure out a way to count them and not waste time. He might not think things through but when he has to, he can think faster than anyone else and create the most insane strategies. (Such as when he was stuck in those golden cymbals and he figured out a clever way to escape).

Macaque might be able to create things or recreate the old, but he’s not able to make anything truly original. He needs a prompt so to say to write his essay. He can’t just create a novel without a starting point. He’s a smart cookie though and he can scheme and plan, but he’s not able to figure out a Plan B on the spot if his Plan A didn’t work.

But that’s not to say that one is smarter than the other. Both are intelligent and have their own strengths.

However, if we’re talking about the novel only, Macaque doesn’t have a strength because he’s the embodiment of Wukong’s flaws. So. The more you know.

Rant over!

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