Anthropologist John Hawks offers some good suggestions:
Don't get me wrong, I like physics as much as anybody. But once your list includes
So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists have had the greatest impact on human life? Yes,
Many later discoveries stood on his shoulders, but
1. R. A. Fisher. His work in population genetics laid the foundations for the vast productivity increases of twentieth-century agriculture. He was far from alone in this, but he stood apart from his contemporaries by inventing many of the statistical methods that would come to define scientific hypothesis testing. Without Fisher's innovations in statistics, large-scale medical research studies would be meaningless. All this after he established the basis for Mendelian inheritance of continuous characters.
Fisher strikes me as the Newton of the 20th Century: the scientist / mathematical innovator.
For the rest of Hawks' list, click here.