Kate Millett

Storefront display of Body Worlds exhibition in Amsterdam (2016)

An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.

Kate Millett's 'Sexual Politics' (1970) read D.H. Lawrence's and Henry Miller's sex scenes as political documents — finding in their prose the grammar of female subordination. Miller's publishers had called him a liberator.

Henrietta Lacks

In 1951, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks's cervix without telling her; her cells, labeled HeLa, became the first immortal human cell line, now totaling over 20 metric tons grown worldwide.

Body Worlds

Body Worlds exhibits real human cadavers with skin removed, posed mid-stride or holding their own lungs — over 47 million visitors have paid to walk among them since 1995.

Michael Rockefeller

Michael Rockefeller, son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, treaded water off New Guinea for hours in 1961 before swimming toward shore. The Asmat people there practiced ritual cannibalism.

Iamblichus

He rose ten cubits off the ground — glowing gold — while his students watched twice. A Syrian Neoplatonist who made ritual magic philosophically respectable. What do you do with a man who keeps floating?

Greek fire

Byzantine warships sprayed Greek fire through bronze siphons — it burned on water and could not be extinguished. The formula died with the empire in 1453, and no chemist has fully reconstructed it since.

Guy Hocquenghem

Hocquenghem's 1972 'Homosexual Desire' declared the anus — not the phallus — the true seat of revolutionary politics. He died of AIDS in 1988, at 41, unrecanted.

Golden eagle

At 150 mph in a stoop, the golden eagle strikes with talons exerting 750 psi — roughly the grip of a hydraulic press on a soda can. Civilizations from the Mongols to Rome named themselves by this bird.

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.