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.
Left a banking career at fifty to become the first woman to reach the highest and lowest points on Earth
A former banking executive who took up mountaineering in her forties, she became the first woman to climb the highest peak on every continent, reach…
Kept alive in a Khmer Rouge death camp because he could paint, he later testified against his captors
A sign painter imprisoned at the Khmer Rouge's Tuol Sleng torture centre, he survived because his captors needed portraits of Pol Pot, then spent the…
Hid in the woods after the Soviet invasion, won four golds in Mexico and turned away from the anthem
The best gymnast in the world in 1968, she went into hiding when Soviet tanks entered Prague, won four golds weeks later, and quietly protested on…
Showed that most of the universe is something we cannot see, and was told the result was impossible
Refused a place at Princeton because it took no women in astronomy, she spent her nights measuring how galaxies spin, and found that the stars at the…
Posted to a dairy job he did not want, he turned India into the world’s largest milk producer
A mechanical engineer who knew nothing about cows was posted to a government creamery in Gujarat to work off a scholarship. He stayed for the rest of…
Jailed under apartheid, paralysed at sixteen, he helped invent the social model of disability
A wheelchair user who came to Britain after prison and banning in South Africa, he co-founded the Union of the Physically Impaired Against…
Built a submarine to reach the bottom of all five oceans, then went and did it himself
An investor and former naval officer who commissioned a submersible capable of reaching any ocean floor, then piloted it to the deepest point of all…
Queen Victoria's goddaughter who went to sea as a marine engineer and held a bombed ship together alone
Britain's first woman marine engineer, she failed her chief engineer's exam dozens of times on grounds that had nothing to do with her ability, then…
Grew up in an orphanage and a slum, then built a haircutting method into a global brand
Raised in poverty in London and placed in a Jewish orphanage for years when his family could not support him, he trained as a hairdresser and turned…
Led 200 Gurindji stockmen and their families off a British cattle station and did not go back for nine years
A head stockman paid in flour and tea, he walked his people off Wave Hill station in 1966. What began as a strike for wages became a claim for land,…
Sold one painting in his lifetime and produced most of his work in the last two years of it
A failed art dealer, teacher and preacher who did not start painting until 27, he made around 2,100 works in a decade of poverty and mental illness,…
Arrived from Delhi with almost nothing and helped start the company that shaped the personal computer
He came to America for graduate study with very little money, co-founded Sun Microsystems in his twenties, and later became one of Silicon Valley's…
Hard of hearing since childhood, he co-wrote the rules that let every computer on earth talk to each other
Born with a hearing impairment, he found that typed messages between computers suited him better than the telephone. With Bob Kahn he designed…
A nanny who took over 150,000 photographs and never showed them to anyone
She worked as a nanny for forty years and spent her days off photographing the streets of Chicago and New York. Her work was found in a storage…
Spent decades as his brother's overworked, underpaid assistant before building his own cereal company
After years working long hours for low pay as a broom salesman and then as his physician brother's assistant, he broke away in his forties to found…
An anonymous Facebook page he built helped bring down a government he never named himself in
A Google marketing manager trained as a computer engineer, he anonymously built a Facebook page around a young man beaten to death by police, then…
The first woman to climb K2, who kept going into the Himalaya until the mountains kept her
An electronics engineer from Wrocław who became the first Polish person on Everest and the first woman on K2, and died on Kangchenjunga trying to…
Rebuilt Chinese printing for the computer age from a hospital bed, half blind with illness
Working through years of chronic illness that left him bedridden for long stretches, he solved the problem of compressing thousands of Chinese…
Used a lamp, a mirror and a round table to work out why the moon goes dark
An eighteenth-century Chinese astronomer and mathematician who, denied any formal scientific education, built simple home experiments to explain…
Planted 50 million trees and became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
She saw that rural women’s hardship and Kenya’s vanishing forests were the same problem, and answered both with a simple act repeated millions of…
Somali model who became a UN ambassador against female genital mutilation after surviving it
Cut at around the age of five and promised in marriage to a much older man at thirteen, she fled her nomadic family across the desert, later became…
Climbed the highest peak on every continent to put Bangladesh, and its silenced voices, on the map
A Bangladeshi mountaineer and activist who became the first person from Bangladesh to climb the Seven Summits, using the project to campaign for…
At 79 she walked the length of the North Island to tell Parliament: not one more acre of Māori land
A storekeeper, farmer and the first president of the Māori Women's Welfare League, she came out of retirement in 1975 to lead a land march of a…
Built the first artificial kidney from sausage skins and orange juice tins in occupied Holland
A young doctor who watched a patient die slowly of kidney failure, he built a dialysis machine from scavenged parts during the German occupation. His…
