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"People are fucking dumb. Only a nation of half-whits could turn this beautiful country into what it is today: a shopping mall. A big fucking shopping mall. Mile after mile, of mall after mall. And how do the people feel about living in a coast to coast shopping mall? They think it's just fucking dandy!" -George Carlin. In the West, Jesus. In the East, Buddha. Pythagoras. He was the first to use a proof in mathematics in discovery of universal applicability of Pythagorean theorem to right triangles. This had immense impact on the way people approached discovery of mathematical knowledge, and development of mathematics influenced development of sciences and technology. The invention of mathematical proof is probably the greatest invention of all time, and its inventor Pythagoras made the greatest impact with it. All great people are standing on the shoulders of giants. Maybe without Johannes Kepler's discoveries Isaac Newton wouldn't discover that same laws guide falling of apple and circling of the moon. Maybe without Bernhard Riemann's geometry Albert Einstein wouldn't discover that E = m*c*c.

It is not the person who made the greatest impact, it is the person who inspired the most other people who made greatest impacts. It can be a writer, philosopher, scientist, mathematician...we can't know. While economic development increases life expectancy, it decreases fertility (birth) rate of a population, in effect reducing the number of all the living human beings over the long historical period. [1][2] Birth control herbs and other methods were known to humans long before birth control pills, about two thousand years before Christ. The core argument however remains -- birth control pill/herb/method etc. Although pills prevent pregnancies, when a woman feels ready to become a mother she can stop taking pills and get pregnant. From a longer time perspective, pills don't prevent births, but delay them. On the other hand, Norman Borlaug, a man who improved wheat crops yields, prevented certain deaths of more than a billion starving people, and therefore enabled them to live, and billions of their children and grandchildren to be born. The one who invented birth control pill. He prevented millions of humans from being born, and billions of would be their children and grandchildren... The one who learned how to make a fire. Or maybe the one who made a wheel, or first stone tool. Then again, maybe it was a person who wrote a first symbol at the wall of a cave, and initiated development of alphabet by passing eternal knowledge to descendants with written and drawn symbols. A person who destroyed Library of Alexandria. By destroying the largest library of the world with human knowledge collected for hundreds of years, he greatly inhibited progress and advancement of human civilization. A person who made the greatest impact on mankind is ... So is it Wallmart? He invented shopping malls ... I think.