So I'm someone who likes to learn things first hand after learning them second hand through the standard material. So Which Theoretical Physicists are essential reading for understanding 20th Century Theoretical Physics?
My current noob/ignorant list is the following: Lorentz, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, De Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac, Fermi, Pauli, Yukawa, Born, Bardeen, Lee, Yang, Landau, Wigner, Feynman, Schwinger, Bethe, Gell-Mann, Cooper, Schrieffer, Josephson, Anderson, Van Vleck, Glashow, Weinberg, Wilson, 't Hooft, Veltman, Gross, Wilczek, Nambu, Higgs, Thouless, Haldane, Kosterlitz, Thorne, Peebles, Penrose and Parisi.
All of these are basically theorists who have won the Nobel Prize in Physics listed in chronological order. Can anyone make this list complete by ordering it more logically and adding unrecognized obscure folks/string theorists who haven't won the Nobel Prize. Such a list would be really handy to have on this site for people like me. I think this would be an important project for a site like this.