Complex Numbers

Unsung

Despite what airy nonsense your life coach may have spouted, it is not possible for one person to change the world.

    5 People Who Changed the World and Got Jack Squat for It  

And even if it were possible (which it's not), there's always the chance that no one would notice.

Link is from Cracked, so don't try to use this in any world-changing scholarly papers.

5. Rosalind Franklin

I agree she got dicked over (pun intended), but I suspect more people recognize her contribution now.

Before 1953, though, the structure of DNA was unknown, until the now ubiquitous double-helix structure was modeled by James Watson and Francis Crick. If you know any names related to the study of DNA, it’s most likely theirs.

To the best of my knowledge, Watson was unrelated to A.G. Bell's Watson, or Sherlock's.

Watson and Crick did admit that solving DNA’s structure without the Franklin data would have been “unlikely, if not impossible,” but apparently putting her name at the top of the paper was a step too far.

In case you're wondering, this is one reason I say it's impossible for one person to change the world: everyone has been influenced by others, and, in many cases, others have to let themselves be influenced by that person.

4. Ignaz Semmelweis

I didn't recognize the name at first, but the thing he did was something I'd heard of.

So what was Semmelweis’ incredible, world-changing medical discovery? It was that doctors should maybe start washing their hands.

This really was tantamount to heresy at one point.

3. Michael Delligatti

When you think of a central figure related to McDonald’s, you might think of the founder, Ray Kroc, or more likely, a fictional and mildly unsettling clown.

Kroc founded McDonald's like Musk founded Tesla Motors: in mythology only.  

You may have assumed the Big Mac was cooked up in some secret burger laboratory deep beneath McDonald’s HQ. In reality, it was Delligatti who suggested a two-patty burger and developed the special sauce, an idea that McDonald’s hated at first.

This may be heresy, too, but I've never really liked the Big Mac. I do miss the McDLT, so it's all for the best that it's no longer available.

So what did Delligatti get for forever changing the cholesterol levels of the human race? The ultimate bare minimum: a plaque.

We all get plaque from eating at McDonald's.

2. Philo Farnsworth

If you’re born with a name like Philo Farnsworth, you basically have two viable career paths: some sort of strange preacher, or a brilliant inventor.

You forgot "supervillain."

I don't feel like copying much of this section; basically, he invented the television. Which, come to think of it, may have caused as much suffering as the Big Mac. (The part that was surprising, to me, was that said invention was nearly 100 years ago.)

1. Henrietta Lacks

As with Franklin above, she's more widely known, these days. Unlike Rosalind Franklin, though, it wasn't what she did that was significant (which in no way should diminish her significance).

For whatever reason, her cells reproduced at an unbelievable rate, and “HeLa” cells have been used in research ever since. She did finally get a book and a movie in which she was played by Oprah, but she and her relatives got a whole lot of absolutely nothing for years after her death.

Played by Oprah? Talk about adding insult to injury.

Moral of these stories: sometimes it just doesn't pay to be influential.