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.
The engineer from Dhaka who worked out how to make skyscrapers stand up cheaply
His tube structures made tall buildings lighter, stronger and far cheaper than before. The Sears Tower he engineered was the tallest building on…
Arrived at Harvard Medical School to find the dormitory had never expected a woman
The first woman admitted to Harvard Medical School, who returned to the Philippines to found its first pediatric hospital and invent a bamboo…
Built a dataset of millions of labelled images that helped trigger the modern boom in AI
Arriving in New Jersey as a teenager barely speaking English, she worked in her family's dry-cleaning shop while finishing school, and later built…
Beaten, jailed and burned out of his home, he kept playing the music that mocked Nigeria's generals
Sent to London to study medicine, he enrolled at music college instead, invented Afrobeat and spent the rest of his life being raided, jailed and…
Skied solo across Antarctica on muscle power alone after her first big expedition nearly broke her
A meteorologist who first went to Antarctica to run a weather station, she went on to lead the first all-female international ski expedition there…
Finished third at the Ironman World Championship six times without ever quite winning it
A university student who tried a triathlon on a whim, she became the first Brazilian woman to reach the Ironman World Championship podium and kept…
Expelled from school for defending Picasso, he made rotund figures Colombia's best-known artistic export
Sent to bullfighting school by his family, he chose painting instead and turned exaggerated, rounded figures into a signature style, later using it…
Rescued from a slave auction as a teenager, she became the first European woman to see Lake Albert
Orphaned and sold into slavery as a girl after her family was killed, she was bought free by the explorer Samuel Baker and became his equal partner…
Founder of modern nursing and a pioneer of using data to save lives
She defied her wealthy family to become a nurse, cut the death rate in the Crimean War hospitals, and then used statistics to force reform of the…
A fashion designer who bid for an unwanted oil licence and built a fortune underground
She trained as a fashion designer and secretary before applying for an oil prospecting licence in the 1990s that other companies had passed over,…
Divorced and hospitalised in her teens, she became Iran's most daring modern poet and a filmmaker
Married at sixteen and divorced within a few years, losing custody of her only child, she wrote confessional poetry that scandalised 1950s Iran and…
A farm girl who joined IBM to pay off her student loan and stayed 45 years to become its first woman Fellow
She meant to be a maths teacher and took a job at IBM in 1957 only to clear her debts. She stayed for the rest of her working life and laid the…
A shopkeeper's son from the Gold Coast who gave his name to a formalism in X-ray physics
He taught himself from the science books in his father's shop, earned a doctorate at Princeton, and then went home to build mathematics and physics…
Survived the Burma railway as a prisoner of war and put the first portable defibrillator in an ambulance
A Belfast cardiologist with a heart damaged by beriberi in a Japanese camp, he realised that people were dying of cardiac arrest before they reached…
Let his jet engine patent lapse because he could not afford the fee, then made it fly anyway
Rejected twice by the RAF for being too short, he designed the jet engine as a 22-year-old cadet, was ignored by the Air Ministry for a decade and…
Gruff eye surgeon who took cataract surgery to Aboriginal Australia, Eritrea and Nepal
A New Zealand-born ophthalmologist who spent years in Aboriginal communities restoring sight, then set up factories in Eritrea and Nepal to make…
Refused to report for internment in 1942 and spent forty years clearing his name
A welder from Oakland who defied the order removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast, lost at the Supreme Court and was shunned in the camps,…
Taught himself to read in secret, escaped slavery at 20, and became the most famous Black man in America
Born into slavery in Maryland, he learned his letters against the law, fought back against a slave-breaker, escaped in a borrowed sailor’s outfit,…
An orphan who left school at 11 and invented the refrigerated lorry that changed what the world eats
Raised by a priest and self-taught as a mechanic, he built a small Minnesota town's first radio transmitter and its cinema sound, then in 1938…
Taught herself Arabic in her thirties and walked alone into corners of the Middle East no Westerner had mapped
Scarred by a factory accident at thirteen and stuck at home through her twenties, she went to Baghdad at 34 and spent the next sixty years travelling…
Turned a lifetime of physical pain into some of the most recognisable paintings of the twentieth century
Polio as a child and a horrific bus accident at 18 left her in pain for life. She began painting flat on her back and never stopped telling the truth…
Skied across Greenland, drifted to the top of the world, then spent his fame on refugees
A scientist who let his ship freeze into the Arctic ice on purpose, walked further north than anyone before him, and later won the Nobel Peace Prize…
A small-town German mayor who invented the credit union to save farmers from moneylenders
Watching famine push indebted farmers into the hands of loan sharks, he organised village co-operative credit societies owned and run by their own…
Organised the market women of Abeokuta and forced a king off his throne over an unjust tax
A teacher who built a union of tens of thousands of women traders, she led the protests that abolished a tax on women and briefly toppled the ruler…
