11.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Jawaharlal Nehru [1889-1964] was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru rose to leadership of the Indian National Congress at a young age in part due to his charisma and advocacy of complete Indian independence from the British Empire. He was the first and longest serving Prime Minister of an Independent India from 1947 to 1964. His appreciation for parliamentary democracy and concern for the poor allowed him to formulate policies derided by some for their socialist leanings. Nehru enjoyed the honorific title of "Scholar" and despite his family's Hindi religious background, was an atheist. Forging am independent, modern India where educational and social opportunities could been afforded to all citizens regardless of religion or caste, this rejection of any particular belief system in a region hosting such wide diversity no doubt helped him toward his considerable accomplishments.

12. Linus Pauling

Linus Carl Pauling [1901-1994] was one of the most influential chemists in history as well as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century - or, according to Gautam Desiraju who wrote the Millennium Essay in the journal Nature, one of the greatest thinkers and visionaries of the last thousand years. One of only 4 individuals ever to have won solo Nobel Prizes in separate and unrelated fields - for chemistry in 1954, and the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless campaign against atmospheric nuclear bomb testing in 1962. His activities in favor of pacifism and against nuclear weapons earned him an appearance before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which explicitly accused him of being in league with the Communists.

Pauling's wife Ava Hellen, whom he married in 1917, was a pacifist and peace activist who got him involved in the crusade against nuclear weapons and atmospheric bomb testing. He had been raised Lutheran and later joined the Unitarian Universalist Church, but publicly declared his personal atheism two years before his death of prostate cancer at the age of 93.

13. Paul Dirac

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac [1902-1984] was a British theoretical physicist who contributed to the early development of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics [QED]. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in physics with Erwin Schrodinger, formulated what became known as the Dirac equation, and held the Cambridge Lucasian Chair in mathematics established by Sir Isaac Newton and currently held by Stephen Hawking. Dirac was noted for his personal humility, refusing to call his contributions to physics by his own name, and for his somewhat Edwardian sense of social propriety. He married Margrit, the sister of fellow Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, in 1937. He adopted her two children and the couple had two more. While he once said that "God used beautiful mathematics in creatiing the world," his personal views on religion were far less expansive. Wolfgang Pauli once described Dirac's first commandment concerning religion as, "God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet."

14. Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand [1905-1982] was a Russian-born writer who emigrated to the U.S. in 1925. Her first play, Night of January 16th, was produced in Hollywood and then

on Broadway. Her autobiographical and anti-Soviet novel We the Living, was published in 1936. Best known for her sweeping intellectual masterpiece Atlas Shrugged, the fiction mystery allowed her to fully develop her philosophy of objectivism. For the rest of her life Rand lectured and wrote about objectivism, which she termed "a philosophy for living on earth." All of the books Rand published during her lifetime are still in print, and her philosophy is still taught at many major universities as one of the most important philosophical movements in the modern world. Objectivism is particularly prized by dedicated capitalists and economists and underpins much of the wider freethought movement.

15. Katherine Hepburn

Katherine Houghton Hepburn [1907-2003] was an acclaimed actress in film, television and stage for 73 years of her long life. She received 12 Academy Award nominations for Best Actress in a film, and still holds the record with four wins. In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked Hepburn as cinema history's greatest female star. A child of New England privilege with a genealogical heritage tracing back to Louis IX of France, she received her degree in history and philosophy from Bryn Mawr despite a record of breaking curfew, smoking and skinny dipping in the fountain. She married socialite businessman Ludlow Ogden Smith in 1928, but divorced six years later. Despite several romances, the love of her live was Spencer Tracy, with whom she made nine movies. In a 1973 interview on The Dick Cavett Show Hepburn said that while she agreed with Christian principles and thought highly of Jesus Christ, she had no personal religious beliefs nor any belief in an afterlife. "I am an atheist and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people."

16. Jacques Monod

Jacques Lucien Monod [1910-1976] was a French biologist who contributed greatly to the understanding of the Lac operon as a regulator of gene transcription in cells, suggested the existence of mRNA molecules in the process of protein synthesis, and further contributed to the field of enzymology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. He married archeologist and orientalist Odette Bruhl in 1938, they had twin sons, Oliver and Phillippe, one of whom became a geologist, the other a physicist. Monod wrote the book Chance and Necessity in 1970, which became a popular primer on the relationship between the roles of random chance and adaptation in biological evolution and provided much ammunition to the atheist community by proposing that the natural sciences revealed an entirely purposeless world that undermines the traditional claims of the world's religions. His views also contributed to the development of the idea of "Memes" that Richard Dawkins made famous in his writings.

17. Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar

Padma Vibhushan Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar [1910-1995] better known by his nickname "Chandra" - has a space-based X-ray observatory named after him, launched by the space shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his important contributions to knowledge about the evolution of stars, he is probably better known for his 1995 opus >Newton's Principia for the Common Reader which explains the detailed arguments of Newton's original Principia using the language and methods of ordinary calculus.

A naturalized American citizen born in Lahore, India, Chandra's family long displayed signs of brilliance, even genius. His father was a government worker and accomplished violinist who wrote several books on musicology. His mother was an intellectual noted for translating Ibsen's A Doll's House into the Tamil language. His paternal uncle was physicist C.V. Raman, who also won a Nobel Prize.

18. Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing [1912-1954] was a mathematician, logician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst from England. He displayed distinct signs of genius early in his life, solving advanced problems without having studied elementary calculus. At the age of 16 he encountered Einstein's work and extrapolated it to question Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this challenge was not made explicit. Perhaps his most momentous achievement was his 1936 paper reformulating Kurt Godel's results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Godel's arithmetic-based formal language with what are now known as Turing machines - formal and simple devices. It was the death of Turing's first love in their last year at Sherborne from complications of bovine tuberculosis (contracted from drinking infected milk as a boy) that shattered Turing's religious faith. He became an atheist with a firm conviction that all phenomena must be materialistic in nature.

19. Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick [1916-2004] is best known as the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. He first coined the term "central dogma" to describe the flow of genetic information in cells as a one-way street - DNA to RNA to protein. His primary interests encompassed two fundamental problems in biology. How non-living molecules become living organisms, and how the human brain creates a conscious mind. On the matter of religion, Crick once said, "Christianity may be okay between consenting adults in private, but should not be taught to young children." In his book Of Molecules and Men he expressed his strong views on the relationship between science and religion. Those views continued to play a role in his work when he transitioned from molecular biology into theoretical neuroscience.

20. Claude Shannon

Claude Elwood Shannon [1916-2001] was an electronic engineer and mathematician known as "the father of information theory." While at the University of Michigan he was introduced to the works of George Boole, and once in grad school at MIT working with the 'differential analyzer', an early analog computer, he saw that Boole's concepts could be used used to simplify the complicated circuitry of the analyzer and wrote his master's thesis on what became known as Boolean logic. His PhD thesis at MIT applied this work to establish mathematical relationships in Mendelian genetics. He became a National Research Fellow at the

Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and worked freely across disciplines with other notable scientists to shape the ideas that became information theory. Shannon and his wife Betty put their collective mathematical and analytical abilities together in a game theory for many successful visits to the gaming tables in Las Vegas and made a fortune. An even bigger fortune was made later by Shannon and colleague Ed Thorp when they applied the same theory (later known as the Kelly criterion) to the stock market.