Impactful Persons

Question 1

Impactful Persons

Who was the Greek king of Macedon who formed a massive empire by conquering stretches from the eastern Mediterranean to the Adriatic Sea to North Africa to Northwestern India?

Answer 1

Alexander the Great

(356 to 323 BCE)

Question 2

Impactful Persons

Name the warlord who led a tribal empire in Central and Eastern Europe in the 400s CE, attacking the Eastern and Western Roman empires (including Persia, Turkey, Italy, and France).

Answer 2

Attila the Hun

(406 - 453 CE)

Question 3

Impactful Persons

Who was the first European to set foot on American soil?

Answer 3

Leif Erikson

(~1000 CE)

Question 4

Impactful Persons

Name the man who united many of the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia, conquered most of central Asia and China, and started an empire which would eventually extend to Poland, Korea, Iran, and Russia.

Answer 4

Genghis Khan

(1158 - 1227 CE)

Question 5

Impactful Persons

Which Italian explorer is well-known for his travels in the Far East?

Answer 5

Marco Polo

(~1280 CE)

Question 6

Impactful Persons

Which Portuguese explorer is credited with being the first European to sail around the southern Cape of Africa to reach India?

Answer 6

Vasco de Gama

(~1497 CE)

Question 7

Impactful Persons

Who is the quintessential reniassance man of history?

Answer 7

Leonardo da Vinci

(1452 - 1519 CE)

Question 8

Impactful Persons

Which Portuguese explorer led the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519?

Answer 8

Ferdinand Magellan

(He died part way through, and Elcano completed the voyage.)

Question 9

Impactful Persons

Who was the famous renaissance polymath who famously proposed a heliocentric model of the galaxy?

Answer 9

Nicolaus Copernicus

(1473 - 1543 CE)

Question 10

Impactful Persons

Which Spanish conquistador led the overthrow of the Aztec empire?

Which Spanish conquistador led the overthrow of the Incan empire?

Answer 10

Hernán Cortés

Francisco Pizarro

Question 11

Who was the Italian scientist who is most famously known for championing a Copernican view (heliocentric) of the galaxy and who is also known as the father of physics?

Answer 11

Galileo Galilei

(1564 - 1642 CE)

Question 12

Impactful Persons

Which British politician and philanthropist spent twenty years as leader of the abolition movement in Britain?

Answer 12

William Wilberforth

(1759 - 1833 CE)

Question 13

Impactful Persons

Name the French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led several successful campaigns during the Revolutionary Wars. He went on to rule much of Europe’s affairs for a decade and built a large empire over continental Europe. Property rights, meritocracy, equal justice before the law, religious tolerance, secular education, fiscal responsibility, etc. were codified, championed, and geographically extended by his legal code.

Answer 13

Napoléon Bonaparte

(1769 - 1821 CE)

Question 14

Impactful Persons

Who was the great English naturalist who spent part of the 1850s in the HMS Beagle studying the flora and fauna of various isles?

(Hint: some of the censored, taboo ideas of his day that he discussed included the fact that animals might have mental faculties, that facial anatomy may not be divine in origin, and that the mind may be a product of the brain [materialism].)

Answer 14

Charles Darwin

(1809 - 1882 CE)

Question 15

Impactful Persons

Who was the English physician who determined the cause of the 1854 London cholera epidemic to be a single, contaminated water pump?

(Hint: he is known as the ‘father of epidemiology.’)

Answer 15

John Snow

(1813 - 1858 CE)

Question 16

Impactful Persons

Who was the once-enslaved man who is well-known for his exceptional oration and writing on abolition and social reform?

Answer 16

Frederick Douglass

(1818 - 1895 CE)

Question 17

Impactful Persons

Who was the French scientist who is now known as ‘the father of germ theory’ for his contributions to our understanding of microbiology?

Answer 17

Louis Pasteur

(1822 - 1895 CE)

Question 18

Impactful Persons

Who was the 1800s scientist and Renaissance man who largely founded the fields of pathology and social medicine?

Answer 18

Rudolf Virchow

(1821 - 1902 CE)

Question 19

Impactful Persons

Who was the Austrian monk who’s work with pea plants and Punnett squares laid the basis for much of our modern understanding of genetics?

Answer 19

Gregor Mendel

(1822 - 1884 CE)

Question 20

Impactful Persons

Name the German chemist who determined the correct six-carbon, alternating double-bond structure of the benzene ring (a major precursor compound), supposedly in a dream he had while traveling through London aboard a horse-drawn omnibus.

(Note: the dream was of a snake spinning and biting its own tail, forming a ring.)

Answer 20

August Kekulé

(1829 - 1896)

Question 21

Impactful Persons

Who was the German chemist credited with the prevention of millions of deaths due to starvation (and the sustenance of our large population sizes today) through his process of fertilizer production that involves capturing atmospheric nitrogen?

(NOTE: he is a Nobel laureate, but he is also highly controversial for his role in developing chemical weapons in the era between the World Wars.)

Answer 21

Fritz Haber

(1868 - 1934 CE)

Question 22

Impactful Persons

Who was the prosecuting attorney in the Scopes monkey trial (1925) (i.e. the anti-evolution, pro-creationism attorney)?

Answer 22

William Jennings Bryan

Question 23

Impactful Persons

Who was the English mathematician and cryptologist who played major roles in formalizing algorithmic/computational concepts, cracking Axis codes during WWII, and producing stored-program computing?

What was the tragic part of his story?

Answer 23

Alan Turing

(1912 - 1954)

He was convicted for his homosexuality and then chemically castrated, and he eventually died of cyanide poisoning at 41 years old.

Question 24

Impactful Persons

Who was the physician, organist, and missionary who devoted his life to treating the indigent in Lambaréné, Gabon?

Answer 24

Albert Schweitzer

(1876 - 1965 CE)

Question 25

# Impactful Persons Who was the Swedish diplomat who gave his life saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis by providing them with faked passports and other documentation?

Answer 25

Raoul Wallenberg

Question 26

# Impactful Persons Name the powerful Nazi who greatly expanded the SS, oversaw the Gestapo, and set up / directed the Nazi concentration camps. ## Footnote *(He was a head mastermind carrying out many of Hitler's goals.)*

Answer 26

**Heinrich Himmler** | (1900 - 1945 CE)

Question 27

# Impactful Persons During the late 1940s and early 1950s, what U.S. official started making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence?

Answer 27

Joseph McCarthy ## Footnote *(McCarthyism and the 'Red scare')*

Question 28

# Impactful Persons Who was the scientist who did much in the early 1950s to identify the shape and structure of DNA via her work in X-ray crystallography?

Answer 28

Rosalind Franklin

Question 29

# Impactful Persons Who was the South African political activist who spent 20 years in prison for his opposition to the apartheid regime? ## Footnote *(Hint: he became the country's first democratically elected leader after his release.)*

Answer 29

**Nelson Mandela** | (1918 - 2013 CE)

Question 30

# Impactful Persons Who was the activist who initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955? *(Hint: she is known as the 'mother of the civil right*s movement.)

Answer 30

**Rosa Parks** | (1913 - 2005 CE)

Question 31

# Impactful Persons Who were the two scientists who determined that DNA base pairs are held together via hydrogen bonds and who constructed a fairly accurate 3D model of human DNA in 1953?

Answer 31

Francis Watson and James Crick

Question 32

# Impactful Persons Who was the civil rights activist who surveyed the sociological state of black WW1 veterans, spoke out vehemently against racist violence/discrimination, helped found the NAACP, promoted pan-Africanism, and wrote *The Souls of Black Folk* and *Black Reconstruction in America*?

Answer 32

**W. E. B. Du Bois** (1868 - 1963 CE)

Question 33

# Impactful Persons Assassinated in 1965, who was the civil rights leader who famously removed his last name (as a tribute to the lost name of his African ancestors) and was a strong proponent of black empowerment through Islam?

Answer 33

**Malcolm X** (1925 - 1965 CE)

Question 34

# Impactful Persons Born to sharecroppers on an Alabama cotton farm, who helped organized the 1963 March on Washington, survived a brutal beating by police during the 1965 march in Selma, Alabama (which he organized), and became a towering figure of the civil rights movement and a longtime U.S. congressman?

Answer 34

**John Lewis** | (1940 - 2020 CE)

Question 35

# Impactful Persons Which three astronauts traveled to the moon in the Apollo 11 mission of 1969?

Answer 35

**Neil Armstrong** **Buzz Aldrin** **Michael Collins** (remained in lunar orbit)

Question 36

# Impactful Persons Who were the two physicians who started the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in 1970 and initiated the globally renowned Jamkhed Model of care delivery in indigent areas?

Answer 36

Mabelle and Raj Arole

Question 37

# Impactful Persons Who was the American atheist who sued to remove prayers from public schools and remained an ardent atheist activist from the 60s through the 90s (until her kidnapping and subsequent murder)?

Answer 37

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Question 38

# Impactful Persons Who was the American agronomist who developed disease-resistant, high-yield wheat strains; thus, winning a Nobel peace prize and being credited with saving over a **billion** lives from starvation?

Answer 38

Norman Borlaug

Question 39

# Impactful Persons Who is the humanitarian physician who attended medical school remotely while providing care in Haiti, co-founded Partners in Health, and has devoted his life to global public health?

Answer 39

Paul Farmer

Question 40

# Impactful Persons What American lawyer and social justice activist founded the Equal Justice Initiative and has dedicated his life to fighting oppression and bias within the U.S. justice system?

Answer 40

Bryan Stevenson

Question 41

# Impactful Persons Which billionaire should go down in history as the best example of a real-life Batman who has uses his billions of dollars to save millions and millions of lives?

Answer 41

Bill Gates

Question 42

# Impactful Persons Who is the physician and public health expert who performed the Whitehall studies, providing clear evidence of the role that stress levels and control over one's life play in determining health outcomes?

Answer 42

Sir Michael Marmot

Question 43

# Impactful Persons Who was the con artist who forged thousands of love letters under a variety of assumed personas of young, attractive women, garnering a massive following of obsessed men across the nation who were often willing to divulge their innermost thoughts and even sometimes respond with large sums of money?

Answer 43

**Donald Lowry** (and the 'church of love') https://behavioralscientist.org/the-usefulness-of-our-delusions/