The best way to answer that question is to flip the sign bit and the verb tense. Whom do we remember best from the past one thousand years? Or longer?<p>The best way to be remembered across the millenia is to be either a sage of some sort (philosopher, mathematician, prophet, law-giver) or to kill a lot of people (conqueror, ruler, and so forth).<p>Therefore, the people who lived in the past hundred years who will be best remembered a thousand years from now will be Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and some thinkers that you've never heard of but that ultra-conservative Christians love to quote.<p>"Those of you who will live into the twenty-first century, come put a wreath on my grave, because this will be the slogan: No more twentieth centuries…" - Isaac Asimov (1974)<p>Have a nice day, and pleasant dreams.
My guesses for who's name will be most widely known by an average person 1000 years from now, no particular order:<p>Hitler<p>Neil Armstrong<p>Gandhi (showing effectiveness of nonviolent resistance)<p>Einstein<p>Vanevar Bush (for his essay "As We May Think")<p>Bin Laden (showing power of terrorism)<p>Craig Venter (as important early bioengineer)<p>Milton Friedman (market economics)<p>Lawrence Roberts (Arpanet)<p>Steve Jobs (mainly just for the iPhone)<p>William Shockley (Head of transistor team)<p>Wright Brothers<p>Richard Stallman (Just because DRM will always exist and he will be known as an early popularizer of related issues)<p>Darwin will be far more important than any of these, but is outside your date range.<p>Who I don't think will make the cut: Tim Berners Lee (world wide web will be too anachronistic) Turing (no emotional resonance with his work, unlike Vanevar Bush)
As long as we have the technology we have today, everyone notable. If there is a nuclear war, biological outbreak or other 1000x Black Swan event, perhaps no one. Those who do survive an apocalypse won't be too worried about remembering anyone as they'll be too busy foraging and trying to defend themselves from roving bands of cannibals.
Albert einstein, bohr, schrodinger(text books), zizek(still alive!), gandhi and neil armstrong.<p>The people that will be remembered in 1000 years aren't actually those frequently in the media(say, steve jobs), steve jobs is clearly overhyped and will fade away just like justin bieber did.
A partial list -
- Albert Einstein (relativity)
- Bohr, Born, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac (quantum mechanics)
- Kurt Godel (incompleteness theorem)
- Alan Turing (universal computer)
- Steve Jobs, Bill Gates (computers, software/philanthropy)
- Tim Berners Lee (world wide web)
1000 years? That is a timeframe long enough to virtually guarantee the occurrence of the Singularity, so I would have to say Vinge/Kurzweil/Eliezer/Goertzel/De Garis, or whomever switches on the first self-modifying artificial general intelligence.