The Greatest Minds of All Time ★ 2021

List of the Greatest Minds of All Time, throughout history. This list represents the most influential thinkers across various disciplines, ranked in a way that represents the power of their ideas and their impact on the world. The wisest men and women include top philosophers, physicists, famous poets, thinkers, teachers, physiologists, artists, inventors, engineers, the most irreplaceable CEOs in the world, economists and politicians and those whose talents span across many fields of study.

This list takes a historic perspective, so the greatest thinkers who are included on this list come from many different eras. The greatest minds of the 21st century may be quite different from great geniuses from the distant past, but each person should be judged within the context of the time that they were living. For example, inventing a new type of telephone in 2013 would not qualify one as "the most brilliant mind of all time," but in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell first patented the telephone, it was an act of genius not seen before.

Leonardo da Vinci
Marie Curie
Galileo Galilei
Isaac Newton
Nikola Tesla
Archimedes
Pythagoras
Albert Einstein
Socrates
Nicolaus Copernicus
Aristotle
Alan Turing
Plato
Michelangelo
Ludwig van Beethoven
Euclid
Johannes Kepler
Michael Faraday
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Wilhelm Röntgen
Johann Sebastian Bach
Max Planck
Johannes Gutenberg
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
René Descartes
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Hippocrates
Blaise Pascal
Johannes Brahms
Werner Heisenberg
Benjamin Franklin
Niels Bohr
Charles Darwin
Friedrich Nietzsche
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe