re: Who is the most important figure in history (who is not a central figure of a religion)?

George Washington! Duh

This. Charles “The Hammer” Martel.

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Charles “The Hammer” Martel.

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Overrated

I'm going to interpret this question as "whose decisions were most important in shaping the modern (western) world?"

I think the answer has to be "what is the most contingent thing"--i.e., what could almost certainly have been radically otherwise had this figure not intervened? With this in mind, if we were including religion, my answer would definitely be Constantine, who brought Christianity from being just one minority cult in the empire to being the privileged cult.

With explicitly "religious" figures out, I think we should begin with the most significant "non-religious" event (ultimately a distinction that doesn't work, but whatever). I would say that this is the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. This event had enormous repercussions--it led to the Greek scholars and manuscripts moving to western Europe, which caused the Reformation. (If you don't believe me, look up Erasmus's New Testament). Perhaps more importantly, the severing of trading routes into the east led to the Age of Exploration, which is what more than anything else transferred the balance of power to western Europe for around 500 years (a period that is now ending).

So this will inevitably be controversial but who is responsible for the conquest? Mehmet II was brilliant, but the empire was so weak that it seems to me the conquest was pretty much inevitable. The Normans for decisively weakening the empire in 1204? Romanos IV for losing the battle of Manzikert? Basil II for expanding the empire, making it rich and therefore a target of opportunity, but who also failed to appoint a successor and therefore weakened the empire with civil wars?

All things considered, I'll say Alexios I Komnenos, the man whose call for Latin help against the Turks launched the Crusades. Unfortunately that help was more or less useless against the turks and in fact it wound up destroying the empire. But the Crusades also profoundly affected western europe as well, bringing it a great amount of learning, civilization, and trading wealth/connections from the arab world. We have to remember that western Europe in the 11th century was a backwater civilizationally compared to the Eastern Roman Empire and the various Arab caliphates.

So that's my answer, Alexios I Komnenos, who invited the Latins in, and inadvertently launched the Crusades and destroyed his dynasty and empire.

Todd Graves

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John Hopfield for his advances in neural networks and machine learning are altering our daily life already and just starting to take hold

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No thanks Skynet.

Churchill (and the Brits voted him out as soon as the war was over)

Washington - could have been the king or the same under another title, did the presidency the right way and set the most important current country in the world on the right track

Mao - important doesn't have to be in a good way, imagine how much better off the world would be if Chaing Kai-Shek would have won

Newton

DJT


MAGA!