Short, honest profiles of people whose courage, curiosity and persistence changed the world around them. Read one when you need a reminder of what’s possible.
A Mississippi sharecropper who was beaten in jail for trying to vote and told the nation about it
The youngest of twenty children, she picked cotton from the age of six and did not know she had the right to vote until she was 44. Trying to use it…
Directed the operations that put an Indian spacecraft into orbit around Mars on the first attempt
A schoolgirl in Lucknow who cut out newspaper clippings about space missions, she became a rare woman in India's aerospace establishment and helped…
A university gardener who found out he did not own his island and took the case that ended terra nullius
Exiled from Murray Island as a teenager, he learned over lunch with two historians that Australian law did not recognise his family's land. Ten years…
Sold newspapers as a boy, failed to become a pilot, and led India into space before becoming its president
The son of a boat owner on the island of Rameswaram, he missed selection as an air force pilot by one place. He directed the rocket that put India's…
Founded the first Black-led labour union to win a contract from a major American company
A Florida-born son of a preacher, he organised Pullman sleeping car porters into the first Black-led union recognised by a major US corporation, then…
Raised a non-violent army of 100,000 Pashtuns and spent a third of his life in prison for it
Known as the Frontier Gandhi, he built schools and a disciplined movement of unarmed Pashtun volunteers against British rule, then was jailed for…
Owned two sets of clothes and ran the world's largest volunteer ambulance service
A refugee who began with a single-room dispensary in Karachi in 1951 and a second-hand van. The Edhi Foundation now runs ambulances, orphanages,…
The first Muslim Nobel laureate in science, disowned by the country he never stopped serving
A boy from a small Punjabi town who set exam records at 14 went on to unify two of nature's forces. Declared a non-Muslim by Pakistan's parliament,…
Won the Olympic marathon barefoot, then kept competing after a car crash left him paralysed
A soldier in the Ethiopian imperial guard who won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome without shoes, the first Black African Olympic champion, and…
Found a baby at its dead mother's breast in the 1980 famine and went home with two orphans, then thousands
A child bride who ran away to Addis Ababa, she came back from a pilgrimage in 1980 with starving children, lost her marriage over it and sold her…
Left alone on an Arctic island with a dying man and a cat, she taught herself to survive for two years
A young Iñupiat seamstress who joined an expedition to Wrangel Island to pay for her son’s medical care, and became its only survivor after the four…
Wrote the first published computer program a century before there was a computer to run it
Byron's daughter, bedridden for a year as a teenager, she taught herself mathematics and saw more clearly than Charles Babbage what his unbuilt…
Called a dreamer for trying to map the ribosome, she spent twenty years proving it could be done
Raised in a poor Jerusalem household and fatherless from the age of eleven, she took on a problem her peers thought impossible and became the first…
Helped build the programming language and interface ideas Steve Jobs later saw and borrowed
A researcher at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, she helped design Smalltalk and the graphical desktop it ran on, then watched much of it become the basis of…
Started sewing children's clothes at her kitchen table because Lagos shops sold nothing she liked
Trained as a lawyer, she left legal practice to make children's clothes at home in Lagos when she could not find well made local options, and built…
Recited a poem to Syria's president as a farm boy and was later jailed for his politics
A farmer's son who taught himself to read, he won a scholarship by reciting a poem to Syria's president, was later imprisoned for his politics, and…
Helped confirm the crater where an asteroid ended the age of dinosaurs
A Colombian-born planetary geologist at NASA who helped confirm that a buried crater in Mexico was the impact site of the asteroid that ended the age…
Built model housing, libraries and clinics for his typewriter workers in a small Italian town
He took over his father's typewriter factory in the small town of Ivrea and turned it into a design-led global company, while building housing,…
Her first novel was rejected for years before she became the best-selling novelist of all time
A wartime hospital dispenser who learned about poisons on the job, she wrote her first detective novel on a dare from her sister, had it turned down…
Survived the Holocaust with false papers, won five Olympic golds at 31 and 35, and lived to 103
Banned from her sport as a Jew and hidden as a maid during the war while her father was murdered at Auschwitz, she became the oldest gymnast to win…
Barred from university, she founded surface chemistry with a tin trough and a button in her kitchen
Kept at home to nurse her parents, she studied the films that form on washing-up water with equipment she built herself, and wrote to a famous…
An Arab envoy whose eyewitness account of a Viking funeral survived a thousand years by accident
Sent by the Abbasid caliph on a diplomatic mission to the Volga region, he recorded one of the only eyewitness accounts of Viking traders in the…
Robben Island prisoner for 26 years who became the moral conscience of the new South Africa
A young Indian South African drawn into resistance politics as a teenager, he was sentenced to life alongside Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial and…
Built a camera fast enough to film atoms moving inside a chemical reaction
Growing up in provincial Egypt with no laboratory to speak of, he went on to invent techniques fast enough to capture chemical bonds breaking and…
Grew up in exile watching his poet father clean toilets, and has spent his life refusing to be quiet
The son of a disgraced poet, he spent his childhood in a labour camp region of Xinjiang, washed dishes in New York, and became the most prominent…
Written off and suicidal at 61, he came back to make Kagemusha and Ran
The director of Seven Samurai lost his backing, was fired from a Hollywood film and cut his wrists after a flop. Financed by admirers abroad, he made…
Measured the size of the Earth from a mountain in the Punjab, and studied India by learning its languages
Carried off as a court scholar by a conquering sultan, he used his captivity to write a study of Indian science and religion that was fair, curious…
