Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Devangshu Datta

Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the general and special theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. He is arguably the most influential scientist of the 20th century but, besides the more than 300 scientific papers Einstein wrote, he also wrote more than 150 non-scientific works that established him as one of the leading thinkers of his era. His intellectual proficiency and original thinking have made the word ‘Einstein’ synonymous with ‘genius’. You can read more about him and his work here.

Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath who reshaped Indian literature, music and art with contextual modernism in the late 19th and 20th centuries. He was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, but he was much more than that. He was an alternative face of modernity that arrived on the horizon just in time: when India and the world had begun to grow weary of modernity’s older face. You can read more about his life and work here.

Devangshu Datta is consulting editor and science and technology correspondent at the Business Standard. He is an editor, along with Nilanjana S. Roy and Anikendra Nath Sen of Patriots, Poets and Prisoners.