eldavojohn's Journal: Most Underrated & Unappreciated Scientist?

Most underrated & unappreciated scientist (of any field--mathematician, physicist, physician, engineer, etc.)?

• Nikola Tesla
• Alan Turing
• Yi Xing
• Robert Hooke
• Max Planck
• Sushruta
• Carl Friedrich Gauss
• Song Yingxing
• Ctesibius
• Gan De
• Richard P. Feynman
• Su Song
• James Clerk Maxwell
• George Gamow
• Shen Kuo
• Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
• Gottfried Leibniz
• Zhang Heng
• Scientologist CowboyNeal Hubbard

While I know that some of these people have things named after them (Gauss, Tesla, Planck), they still may be conceived to be under appreciated. I imagine you would measure how under appreciated they are based on how much their work influenced our lives today without anyone knowing what they did. Anyone have any other favorites?

my additions:

[yagu]

I'd add:

• René Descartes [wikipedia.org] (brought us "cartesian".)
• Bill Joy [wikipedia.org] (vi and all of its spawn... (okay, a little lustre off the petina for inventing csh))
• Robert Moog [wikipedia.org] brought electronic and synthesized music.
• Donald Knuth [stanford.edu] and his legacy [wikipedia.org]. His series on computer programming is stunning.
• the guy from Washington state who invented Bittorrent

I don't know if these are "under" recognized, but I'd bet most do not know or remember their contributions. (I suppose now someone's got to add RMS and emacs... sigh.)

Add: Charles Babbage; Challenge: L Ron Hubbard

[andphi]

I would suggest adding Charles Babbage to the list. He's both relatively unknown (outside the field, that is) and a milestone in the development of the computer. Of course, the opposite could also be argued - that his very advanced case of creeping featuritis prevented him from getting any real work done, and that any of the advances he would have made were in fact pioneered by J.H. Muller (who is equally, if not more, obscure) as a result of that weird independent simultaneous invention thing that sometime

Not Gauss.

[derrida]

At least in Germany. There were even 5 Deutsche Mark bank notes [bundesbank.de] with him.
My take: Srinivasa Ramanujan [wikipedia.org].