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Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

MA Lloyd malloy00 at io.com
Tue Sep 22 19:30:10 EST 1998


On 22 Sep 1998, Ketil Z Malde wrote:

>However, a millenium is a mighty long time, and I'd like to point out
>that the Chinese invented stuff like paper, printing, compasses,
>firearms, and of course a bunch of philosophies...unfortunately, they
>don't seem to have retained the names of inventors (with the exception
>of the philosophies), and a lot of that may have been in previous
>millennia.  No match for Jesus. :-)

Some of them are preserved.  Paper was invented in 105 by Ts'ai Lun.
Printing is prehistoric (think handprints on rock art) but Pi Sheng is 
sometimes credited with movable type about 1050.  And several important 
Chinese innovations would qualify for the millenium before Jesus.  

FWIW the most popular work playing this game is probably Michael H Hart's
The 100.  His ordering can of course be debated, but it isn't too bad; I
doubt you can make a decent case for anybody he hasn't put in the top 25.  
His entries in the top 25 that fall into this millenium are Newton, 
Gutenberg, Columbus, Einstein, Pasteur, Galileo, Darwin, Copernicus, 
Lavoisier, Watt, Faraday, Maxwell, and Luther.

Incidentally, when compiling lists like this you should try to avoid
the temptation to overestimate the importance of recent figures, with
few exceptions you don't have enough time depth to evaluate their
long term importance.  This is a lot of what makes the Time Man of the
Year list so funny looking back on it.  

-- MA Lloyd (malloy00 at io.com)




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