She was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize, in 2004.

She received the UK's most prestigious architectural award, the Stirling Prize, in 2010 and 2011.

In 2012, she was made a Dame by Elizabeth II for services to architecture, and, in February 2016, she became the first woman to be individually awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting, sold for $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.

She is the first African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the present-day New Orleans Museum of Art.

Her paintings are among the most expensive by Indian women painters today, although few acknowledged her work when she was alive.

Works by Branch are included in the collections of Tate Britain, the Legion of Honor De Young Museum in San Francisco, California, and the St Louis Museum of Art in Missouri.

He has received several distinctions and prizes, such as the Premio Duemila Prize at the XLIV Venice Biennale the Turner Prize, the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, the Padma Bhushan, a knighthood, and an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Oxford.

In 2017, Wiley was commissioned to paint former President Barack Obama's portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

He was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.

He is most known for his bark painting, producing many works using natural ochres on eucalyptus bark.

His work helped modify Western perspectives of "contemporary" art while also helping bring Aboriginal art to the Western art landscape.

Her work has contributed to the renaissance in painting the Black figure.

Her paintings often are presented in solo exhibitions.

In 2017, she was awarded the Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

She is best known for her large scale, black-and-white line drawings, she performs many of her drawings for a live audience.

Born in London, Martin lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.

Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters", as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools" and as a "modern master".

A hallmark of his art is the brightly coloured Ankara fabric he uses.

As Shonibare is paralysed on one side of his body, he uses assistants to make works under his direction.

In 2017 she became the first black woman to be awarded a commission to create a work for Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries.

His work includes architecture, interior design, graphic design, textiles, sculpture, and furniture. His work uses design as a medium for storytelling, referencing his British and Nigerian heritage.

He graduated in civil engineering from the NED University of Engineering and Technology in 1962, and has been working as a visual artist since his arrival in London from Pakistan in 1964.

One of his most famous works is Kesh Angels (2010), a photograph of five veiled women from Marrakech sitting on motorbikes in front of the Theatre Royal.

He was commissioned by Vogue to shoot a series of photographs of pop singer Billie Eilish for the cover of their March 2020 magazine.

He was the Director of Visual and Special Effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

In October 2012, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo as the first Chinese national Laureate.

She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist.

He was the son of a doctor from Sierra Leone. He and his mother moved to Croydon when he was a baby.

He studied at the Royal College of Music.

She won the Artists Fellowship (2006) and the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2009).

She is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Calgary.

She is a seven-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, and considered a Great Canadian Filmmaker of the Future by CBC Arts.

The Electricity of Every Living Thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, was adapted as an audio drama by Audible.

In his work, Zephaniah drew on his lived experiences of incarceration, racism and his Jamaican heritage.

In 2003, he was offered appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) but publicly rejected the honour, stating that: "I get angry when I hear that word 'empire'; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality […]”

He has received numerous awards for his work.

Rushdie's works have spawned 30 book-length studies and over 700 articles on his writing.

He is frequently mentioned a favourite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970.

The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987).

She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

She was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018.

West was awarded the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the development of satellite geodesy models.

In his research, Turner became the first person to prove that insects can hear and can distinguish pitch. In addition, he first discovered that cockroaches can learn by trial and error and that honeybees can see visual patterns.

Besides his scientific work, Turner was active in the struggle to obtain social and educational services for African Americans in St. Louis, Missouri.

She was the first woman and first African American to receive a master's degree from the University of Hawaii, and was also the university's first female and African American chemistry professor.

She died at 24 and her contributions to science were not recognized until many years after her death.

He was a pioneer in large-scale chemical synthesis of progesterone and testosterone.

His work laid the foundation for the production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.

He was a member of parliament (MP) representing the constituency of Bethnal Green North East in the Parliament of the United Kingdom between 1895 and 1906, the third British MP of Indian descent, after David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, and fellow Parsi Dadabhai Naoroji.

Bhownaggree was the longest-serving British Asian MP until Keith Vaz (who was first elected in 1987 and stood down in 2019).

He was the first to clinically distinguish between smallpox and measles. 

Through translation, his medical works and ideas became known among medieval European practitioners, and profoundly influenced medical education in the Latin West. 

Edward Granville Browne considers him as "probably the greatest and most original of all the Muslim physicians, and one of the most prolific as an author". 

Additionally, he has been described as the father of paediatrics, and a pioneer of obstetrics and ophthalmology.

She was an expert in spectrophotometric analysis of pharmaceutical molecules.  

In 1963, Levant Hayden was appointed chief of the spectrophotometer research branch in the Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. 

Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra.  

He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity". 

Known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.

The world’s first computer programmer.

She was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke.

He is known for contributing to several aerospace companies.

See his Wikipedia page

He is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of New Mexico (UNM).

He is best known for inventing the discrete cosine transform (DCT) in the early 1970s. The DCT is the most widely used data compression transformation, the basis for most digital media standards (image, video and audio) and commonly used in digital signal processing.

He also described the discrete sine transform (DST), which is related to the DCT.

Born free on the Ontario shore of Lake Erie to parents who fled enslavement in Kentucky, he travelled to the United States as a young child when his family returned in 1847, becoming a U.S. resident and citizen.

His inventions and accomplishments were honoured in 2012 when the United States Patent and Trademark Office named its first regional office, in Detroit, Michigan, the "Elijah J. McCoy Midwest Regional Patent Office".

He was one of the most prominent black scientists of the early 20th century.

He wanted poor farmers to grow other crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life.

Apart from his work to improve the lives of farmers, Carver was also a leader in promoting environmentalism.

He is recognized for his work unlocking the role of the cell surface in the development of organisms.

He was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale University in 1876.

On the basis of his academic record, he was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

In 1874, he became one of the first African Americans to graduate from Yale College.

Bouchet was also among the first 20 Americans (of any race) to receive a Ph.D. in physics and was the sixth to earn a Ph.D. in physics from Yale.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory.

He was the first Pakistani and first Muslim from an Islamic country to receive the Nobel Prize in science.

He helped to synthesise the cancer-fighting alkaloids obtained from the rosy-periwinkle.

He is currently serving as Professor Emeritus at the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences at the University of Karachi.

He has twice served as the President of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences (2003-2006, and 2011–2014).

Known for his research in gamma spectroscopy and the experimental development of the linear accelerator.

He established the nuclear engineering, nuclear physics and nuclear technology institutes in Pakistan.

Famous for contributions to particle physics and quantum electrodynamics.

Also known for the exploration of macroscopic quantum effects in optomechanics.

After working on the idea for almost twenty years, he successfully created a prototype in 1998 – a disposable pill-sized camera that passes straight through the digestive tract, continuously broadcasting to an external receiver.

Iddan's invention was approved by the FDA in 2001. In 2011 he became a European Inventor Award nominee.

The Raman effect was discovered on 28 February 1928. The day is celebrated annually by the Government of India as the National Science Day.

He also presented the popular CBBC game show Get Your Own Back, which he now tours with around the UK.

He was possibly a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who was posthumously deified.

His rule probably would have taken place sometime in the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period, c. 2900 – 2350 BC, though he became a major figure in Sumerian legend during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 – c. 2004 BC).

Latimer's innovations in the design of carbon filaments, which were used in incandescent light bulbs, significantly improved the bulb's efficiency and made it more practical for everyday use.

His contributions to the lighting industry helped make electric lighting more accessible and affordable.

While Thomas Edison is often credited with inventing the practical incandescent light bulb, Latimer's contributions to its development were invaluable, and he played a crucial role in advancing the technology.

Along with Hermann Oberth and Robert H. Goddard, he is one of the pioneers of space flight and the founding father of modern rocketry and astronautics.

His works later inspired Wernher von Braun and leading Soviet rocket engineers Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, who contributed to the success of the Soviet space program.

He first reported that uterine cancer cells could be detected in vaginal smears in 1928, but his work was not widely recognized until the 1940s.

In 1961, he was invited to the University of Miami to lead and develop the Papanicolaou Cancer Research Institute there.

Despite having almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.

He was the Diwan of Baroda from 1874, before moving to England, where he was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, representing Finsbury Central between 1892 and 1895.

He was the second person of Asian descent to be a British MP.

His book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India brought attention to his theory of the Indian "wealth drain" into Britain.

In 2014, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg inaugurated the Dadabhai Naoroji Awards for services to UK-India relations.

After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad.

During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army.

In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.

She served in the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Home Secretary from 2016 to 2020 and is an advisor to the Privy Council.

She is both the first black woman elected to parliament and the longest-serving black MP.

She remains a member of the Labour Party, while sitting in the House of Commons as an independent, having had the whip suspended in April 2023.

Madhava made pioneering contributions to the study of infinite series, calculus, trigonometry, geometry, and algebra.

He was the first to use infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, which has been called the "decisive step onward from the finite procedures of ancient mathematics to treat their limit-passage to infinity".

One of the first Black Canadians to graduate from McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine.

Instrumental in designing a long-lasting plastic to sheath telephone cables.

She founded the Nursing Program at Spelman College, where she was the first black faculty member.

Known for his contributions to scientific knowledge in the field of mathematics and statistical physics.

One of the pioneers of nano-technology.

Known for important contributions to the field of nanomaterial-based catalysts.

He made contributions to the fields of superstring and string theory.

He was the first Pakistani physicist to publish a research paper in the field of superstring theory.

His Saha ionisation equation allowed astronomers to accurately relate the spectral classes of stars to their actual temperatures.

Saha's equation is considered one of the ten most outstanding discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics since Galileo's invention of the telescope in 1608.

He was elected as an independent member to the Parliament of India in 1952.

He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, in developing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate.

A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954 by the Government of India.

The class of particles that obey Bose statistics, bosons, was named after Bose by Paul Dirac.

A polymath, he had a wide range of interests in varied fields, including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature, and music.

He served on many research and development committees in India after independence.

His major contributions were in the study of the fossil plants of India and in plant evolution.

Awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the structure and function of ribosomes.

He shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell's synthesis of proteins.

She is neurodivergent - dyslexic and dyspraxic.

She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, which led to her needing to use a wheelchair.

The first person to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Hawking suffered an early-onset, slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease.

She is a prominent proponent of the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter and the author of more than 60 scientific papers on animal behaviour.

She is autistic.

She co-founded the American Astronomical Society's Working Group on Accessibility and Disability.

She is diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

She was the first African-American woman to receive a promotion and supervise a group of staff at NACA.

She became NASA's first black female engineer.

She was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counsellor.

She has been described as a ‘universal genius’, or ‘polymath’.

He designed, built, and flew the first powered airships and won the Deutsch prize in 1901, when he flew around the Eiffel Tower in his airship No. 6, becoming one of the most famous people in the world in the early 20th century.

He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge to developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II.

This allowed medics to save thousands of Allied forces' lives during the war.

As the most prominent African American in the field, Drew protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood, as it lacked scientific foundation, and resigned his position with the American Red Cross, which maintained the policy until 1950.

She was known as both an organic and analytical chemist.

Hill worked on the properties of ultraviolet light, developing analytic methodology, and, in collaboration with her husband Carl McClellan Hill, developing ketene synthesis which supported the development of plastics.

She is believed to be one of the first African-American women to be awarded with a master's degree in chemistry.

Hill was an analytical chemist, designing spectroscopic methods and developing ways to track the progress of the reactions based on solubility.

McBay also co-founded the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE).

With Japan still suffering from a shortage of food in the post-war era, the Ministry of Health tried to encourage people to eat bread made from wheat flour that was supplied by the United States. Ando decided to develop the production of noodles by himself.

The experience convinced him that "Peace will come to the world when the people have enough to eat."

Her patent didn't get far as she got no manufacturing firms to agree to make her invention.

Sara-Scott Wingo, Anderson’s great-great niece, said in an interview with NPR News, “She didn't have a father. She didn't have a husband. And the world was kind of run by men back then.”

Inventions attributed to her by the Shakers include the circular saw, the spinning wheel head, and false teeth.

She became a member of the Harvard Shaker community in 1793.

As a Shaker, Babbitt never patented any of her inventions.

Bath was the first African-American to serve as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University.

She was also the first African-American woman to serve on staff as a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center.

Bath was the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose.

A holder of five patents, she founded the non-profit American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in Washington, D.C.

She held 55 patents.

She was the first woman to be awarded a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, in 1926.

Blodgett was issued eight U.S. patents during her career.

She published over 30 technical papers in various scientific journals and was the inventor of poison gas adsorbents, methods for deicing aircraft wings, and improving smokescreens.

His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel.

In the West, Achebe is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.

miniature wooden houses, each one carved from a single piece of wood.

Originally from Japan, Akama studied architecture at Tohoku University of Art and Design, in Yamagata, Japan and began his working career as an architect. 

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After his move to the UK in 2011, he was inspired to make small buildings based of vernacular houses from his travels around Asia and interesting buildings seen in the UK.

Babirye's work is of large-scale ceramics, wooden sculptures, African masks, as well as drawings and paintings on paper.

Babirye has had exhibitions at the Gordon Robichaux Gallery and the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, as well as the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London. She has also produced work for Heidi Slimane for Celine's Art Project.

Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected, because it contradicted the science of the time, which held that no significant elemental differences distinguished the Sun and Earth.

Independent observations eventually proved that she was correct.

Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.

On November 10, 1903 Anderson was granted her first patent for an automatic car window cleaning device controlled from inside the car, called the windscreen wiper.