Best Late 20th

Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. is an American astrophysicist born in 1941 who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics with Russell Hulse for their 1974 discovery of the first binary pulsar using the Arecibo Observatory. The binary system PSR B1913+16 provided the first indirect evidence for gravitational w...

Ted Hoff is an American electrical engineer who, while working at Intel in 1971, collaborated with Federico Faggin and Stanley Mazor to develop the Intel 4004 microprocessor. The 4004 was the first commercial single-chip microprocessor, containing approximately 2,300 transistors on a chip measuring...

Clifford Geertz was an American anthropologist central to the development of interpretive, or symbolic, anthropology. He introduced the method of "thick description," which treats culture as a system of meaning to be read rather than measured. His fieldwork was primarily conducted in Indonesia and M...

Ernő Rubik is a Hungarian architect, sculptor, and professor of design who invented the three-dimensional mechanical puzzle known as the Rubik's Cube in 1974. He created the puzzle as a teaching tool to help his students understand three-dimensional geometry and spatial relationships. The puzzle ach...

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) was an Austrian-American anthropologist recognized for integrating Marxist political economy and world-systems analysis into the study of culture and society. His most famous work, 'Europe and the People Without History' (1982), examined how non-Western societies were deeply af...

New York represents one of America’s most influential cities. Its history reflects waves of immigration creating a remarkably diverse population. The metropolis is globally recognized for its contributions to culture, finance, and media. It attracts residents and visitors seeking career opportunitie...

Marilyn Strathern (born 1941) is a British anthropologist whose work has profoundly influenced feminist anthropology and the study of kinship, gender, and social institutions. Her ethnographic research focuses primarily on the Melanesian societies of Papua New Guinea, specifically the Hagen people....

Talal Asad (born 1932) is a Saudi-born anthropologist whose theoretical work has influenced the study of religion, secularism, and postcolonialism. Born to an Austrian mother and a Pakistani father, he was raised in Saudi Arabia, India, and Pakistan before settling in the West. Asad's scholarship cr...

Jim Gunn is an American astronomer and professor at Princeton University known for his significant contributions to astrophysics and telescope instrumentation. He played a crucial role in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), leading the design of the project's massive CCD camera to conduct wide-fiel...

David Graeber was an American anthropologist and political activist whose work bridged economic anthropology and anarchist political theory. He taught at Yale University and later at the London School of Economics, and was a leading figure in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, credited with coini...

Sherry B. Ortner (born 1941) is an American anthropologist whose work has shaped feminist anthropology, practice theory, and the study of class and culture in the United States. Her early fieldwork with Sherpa communities in the Himalaya produced Sherpas Through Their Rituals (1978) and High Religio...

Arthur Kleinman (born 1943) is an American psychiatrist and anthropologist whose work helped establish medical anthropology as a major subfield. His books Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980) and The Illness Narratives (1988) distinguished between disease as biological pathology and...

Arjun Appadurai (born 1949) is an Indian-born anthropologist whose work has influenced the anthropology of globalization, media, and cultural flows. In Modernity at Large (1996), he introduced the concept of "scapes"—ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes—to describe t...

Icko Iben Jr. (born 1931) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist known for theoretical models of stellar evolution. His research focuses on the later stages of stellar lifecycles, including red giant and asymptotic giant branch stars. He worked extensively on nucleosynthesis, the process by wh...

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (born 1944) is an American anthropologist known for ethnographic research on violence, inequality, and the politics of health, and for co-founding Organs Watch, a project documenting the global trade in human organs. Her book Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life...

Roy Rappaport (1926–1997) was an American ecological anthropologist whose 1968 monograph *Pigs for the Ancestors* examined the ritual cycle of the Maring people in highland New Guinea. He argued that ritual practices regulating pig slaughter, warfare, and planting functioned as mechanisms of ecologi...

Stanley Tambiah (1929–2014) was a Sri Lankan-born anthropologist who taught at the University of Chicago. His work on Theravada Buddhism in Thailand included *Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in Northeast Thailand* (1970) and *The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets* (1984), examining...

Wallace Sargent was a Welsh-American astronomer who served as a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the director of the Palomar Observatory. His research focused on observational cosmology, where he made pioneering contributions to the understanding of quasar absorption...

Philippe Bourgois is an American anthropologist known for ethnographic research on urban poverty, structural violence, and drug economies. His book *In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio* (1995), based on fieldwork in East Harlem, New York, examined the lived realities of crack cocaine de...

Gayle Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist and influential feminist theorist whose work has been foundational to gender and sexuality studies. Her 1975 essay "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex" introduced the concept of the sex/gender system, analyzing how kinship s...

Jean Comaroff is a South African-born anthropologist who has taught at the University of Chicago and Harvard University. Her work, much of it co-authored with John L. Comaroff, examines the historical and ongoing entanglement of colonialism, Christianity, capitalism, and ritual in southern Africa, d...

Laura Nader is an American anthropologist who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she joined the faculty in 1960. She is known for advocating the anthropological study of powerful institutions—a project she framed as 'studying up'—and for comparative research on dispute resolutio...

Maurice Godelier is a French anthropologist, born in 1934, who combined Marxist theory with ethnographic fieldwork, most extensively among the Baruya people of Papua New Guinea. His major works include *The Making of Great Men* (1982), which examined male initiation, power, and exchange in Baruya so...

Johannes Fabian is a Belgian anthropologist, born in 1937, who taught at the University of Amsterdam and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Katanga region of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He is best known for critiques of how anthropological discourse constructs temporal dis...

John L. Comaroff is a South African-born anthropologist and the Hugh K. Foster Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology at Harvard University. Much of his work focuses on the intersections of colonialism, law, and capitalism, and he frequently co-authors research with hi...

James Clifford is an American historian and cultural critic who served as a prominent professor in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is best known for co-editing the influential 1986 volume "Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnograph...

Paul Rabinow was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recognized for his contributions to the anthropology of the contemporary. He gained early recognition for his 1977 book "Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco," which provided a critical, introspective...

Sally Falk Moore was an American legal anthropologist and a professor at Harvard University. She is best known for introducing the concept of the "semi-autonomous social field" in her 1978 book "Law as Process," which analyzed how social groups generate internal rules while remaining subject to stat...

David M. Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Chicago who pioneered the symbolic approach to studying kinship. In his 1968 book "American Kinship," he analyzed how biological concepts like "blood" function primarily as cultural symbols of unity. He lat...