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.
Paralysed below the knees by polio, she won Olympic silver competing against men
Struck by polio while pregnant, she relearned to ride with no use of her lower legs and won a dressage silver at the 1952 Olympics, the first woman…
Explained nuclear fission while in exile, then refused to help build the bomb
Banned from the main building of her own institute for being a woman, she became one of the leading physicists in Germany, fled the Nazis with ten…
Talked students out of Tiananmen Square, then spent the rest of his life in and out of prison for his ideas
A literary critic who flew home from New York to join the 1989 protests, he helped negotiate the students’ safe exit, refused to leave China…
The NASA engineer who invented the Super Soaker by accident and spends the royalties on battery research
Raised in segregated Alabama, he was the only Black student at a 1968 science fair and won it with a robot built from scrap. He worked on the Galileo…
Learned the cornet in a reform school for waifs and went on to change American music
Raised in the poorest part of New Orleans by a mother who was sometimes forced into prostitution, he was sent to a home for delinquent boys at 11,…
Blinded at three in his father's workshop, he invented at fifteen the alphabet blind people still read with
A harness maker's son who lost his sight to an accident and an infection, he took a clumsy military code of raised dots and reduced it to a six-dot…
Worked for fifty years in near obscurity and had her first major retrospective at 70
She spent decades making sculpture in a New York studio while the art world looked elsewhere, then became one of its most celebrated figures in her…
Painted and taught for thirty years outside the art world's gaze, then won the Turner Prize at sixty-three
Born in Zanzibar and raised in London, she organised exhibitions of Black women artists in the 1980s when no gallery would, taught for decades in…
Pushed for years to be allowed to run a Saudi company in an economy that assumed she could not
She joined her family's Saudi conglomerate as a young graduate and spent decades working her way to chief executive of Olayan Financing Company,…
Voted the best hockey player in the world eight times, without ever winning the Olympic gold she wanted
A skinny girl from Rosario who was told she was too small, she was named world player of the year eight times, won two World Cups, and retired with…
A refugee surgeon who refused to let paralysed soldiers die and invented the Paralympics
A Jewish neurosurgeon who fled Germany in 1939 and in 1944 took over a hut of spinal injury patients at Stoke Mandeville, most expected to die within…
Went deaf in his twenties and wrote his greatest music when he could not hear a note of it
Beaten into practice by an alcoholic father and losing his hearing just as his career took off, he considered suicide at 31, decided to live for his…
Sold into slavery by his own father at ten, he freed himself and then hundreds of others through the courts
Born free in Bahia and sold to pay his father's gambling debts, he learned to read at seventeen, proved his own freedom, and became a self-taught…
Started as a teenage shop assistant in her aunt's store and built it into a national retail chain
She began working behind the counter of a small family shop in the Brazilian interior as a teenager and, decades later, led Magazine Luiza from a…
Fired by IBM for transitioning, she started again from nothing and rewrote how computer chips are designed
A brilliant young IBM researcher, she was sacked in 1968 when she told the company she was transitioning. Rebuilding her career in secret, she went…
Free-climbed The Nose of El Capitan when the best men in the world had failed
A five-foot-two climber who survived a near-fatal fall in France, then in 1993 made the first free ascent of the most famous rock climb in the world,…
Her paper on how complex cells arose was rejected fifteen times, and turned out to be right
A biologist who argued that the powerhouses inside every animal and plant cell were once free-living bacteria. Colleagues mocked the idea for a…
Painted cinema hoardings for pennies in Bombay and became India's most famous painter, then died in exile
A billboard painter who slept on the pavement, he became the most celebrated and prolific artist of modern India, and at ninety, hounded by lawsuits…
Watched the Bengal famine as a student and spent his life making sure India could feed itself
A plant geneticist who turned down a professorship in America to go home to a country living from ship to mouth, and within a decade had helped…
The engineer who tamed floods, built a great dam and is honoured every year on India's Engineers' Day
From a poor village family near Bangalore, he became the outstanding civil engineer of British India, patented automatic flood gates, drained a…
Born to formerly enslaved parents, she became the first self-made female millionaire in America
Orphaned at seven and widowed at 20, she worked as a laundress for 18 years before building a haircare empire that employed thousands of Black women…
Widowed at 27, she took over a failing wine house and made champagne a global business
When her husband died in 1805 she was expected to sell up. Instead she ran the champagne house herself through war and blockade, invented a way to…
Doctor, engineer and dancer who became the first Black woman to fly in space
She entered Stanford at sixteen, served as a Peace Corps doctor in West Africa, flew on the shuttle Endeavour in 1992 and left NASA soon after to…
Hid her aristocratic birth to get into art school and wove sculptures the size of rooms in a tiny flat
A landowner's daughter who saw her mother maimed by soldiers in the war, she concealed her origins under communism and made enormous hanging forms…
