@Tombi. Euler over Gauss?

@Hatmoza. I don't think Jesus is greater because he's any more correct. Just more influential.

No mention of Moses? He was kind of important. I'll leave this post here and make my list later. This will take a lot of thought.

I dunno.  I have a hard time putting ANY scientist on to such a list.  Science is simply fact...

If Einstein wasn't there... there would be another Einstein, it may not of happened right away, but it would of happened. 

Science is a real thing that will be discovered, and more often then not when someone makes the discovery... they are usually just a half a step infront of other people.

It's not like something like FDR or Ghengis Khan who made decisions that the next guy in line most surely wouldn't have made had they not been around.

Science is always there to be discovered... a leader who makes a crucial decision, in a crucial point in time... that's a unique moment that can never come again.

To put it another way, Einsteins discoveries were HUGE, however they were also inevitable.

Not only inevitable but the pieces of what he said were likely already being put together by others.

Had Einstein not existed, chances are people would be arguing that "Silverman" deserves to be on this list, or whoever else shortly made the discovery afterwords.

Not to say such things aren't important, but when it comes to the most important achievements and people of all time, I think the inevitability of such a discovery should weigh heavily.

@Kasz. Einsteins discoveries were not inevitable, well some of them were but one wasn't. The General Theory of Relativity was so completely out of left field that I don't see any reason why it would have been discovered even now.

There was no slow march of progress towards it then a moment of brilliance at the end.

There have been few discoveries like it in any field.

I'd forgotten that.

Fair enough, in which case Einstein would pretty much be the only scientist you could put on the list.

Now that I think about it now, I do remember a big deal being made that Einstein had a previous theory that would of ruined his credibility, but nobody listened to it ironically, and when his calculations proved way off, few people took notice.

MAYBE Newton as well... though i'm not so sure.

I actually don't think anyone up to this day would have discovered General Relativity (maybe special) had Einstein not existed. He basically cut himself off from the rest of the scientific community for 10 years to come up with GR. It isn't a small step, it is a giant leap in logic, intuition and imagination that has never been rivalled before or after. 

I find it hard to put politicians in the list because their work isn't everlasting.

You don't think so?  You don't think we still aren't effected by the Roman Empire?  Or Ghengis Khan's reign?  Even long after their empires have crumbled, the effects their kingdoms had have giant effects in our lives.

You'd be surprised just how much cultural history effects people... even hundreds of years after.

The effects of people like the Roman's will outlast the memory of the Romans.  (assuming we don't just... well die.)

It might of been the 'cosmological constant' that he put into his equations because he believed the Universe was static and his equations predicted an expanding universe (before Hubble's discovery). 

Newton wrote three times more papers on Alchemy than he did on Maths and Physics combined. 

Although his use of Maths to describe the Universe was considered almost blasphemy by the academics at the time. 

Stuff that far away i'm hesitant to judge on.

I mean hell, few people even know that Darwin's theories on evolution had people who pretty much had concluded the same thing but just didn't publish it as scientific per say.

The problem with scientific revolutions is... often times there are a lot of people who agree with the person who made the discvoery... it's just they're younger... and there works often go unpublished or ignored... then it seems like there is a "wave" where everyone accepts the theory and suddenly a burst of new scientific inquiry... when in reality it's those who were ostracizied by the scientific community getting their time to shine as the older people are pushed aside their theories defunct.

Science as an orginization sadly doesn't work as scientifically as people would think.