FOM: General Intellectual Interest

[JoeShipman@aol.com]

In support of Steve's contention that F.O.M. is of great "general intellectual
interest", 
this week's TIME magazine names the 20 most influential minds of the 20th
century 
(actually 24 people since three were teams), and the only mathematicians on 
the list are Godel and Turing, both of whom are central to f.o.m.

The complete list:

Leo Baekland (chemist, founded modern plastics industry)
Tim Berners-Lee (invented World Wide Web)
Rachel Carson (environmentalist)
Albert Einstein
Philo Farnsworth (invented TV)
Enrico Fermi
Alexander Fleming (discovered penicillin)
Sigmund Freud
Robert Goddard (rocket scientist)
Kurt Godel 
Edwin Hubble (discovered expansion of Universe)
John Maynard Keynes
Louis, Mary, and Richard Leakey (anthropologists)
Jean Piaget (child psychologist)
Jonas Salk (invented polio vaccine)
William Shockley (invented transistor)
Alan Turing 
James Watson & Francis Crick
Wilbur and Orville Wright
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein fans will be pleased to see him up there with Godel and Turing.

Which other mathematicians might plausibly make such a list?  The influence of
Hilbert and Poincare was immense within mathematics but not great outside of
it.  Maybe John von Neumann; I can't think of any others.

-- Joe Shipman