When it comes to scientific importance, it's important to separate out popular visibility and scientific visibility. If you're not a string theorist, for example, you might have difficulty sorting the names on this list by impact instead of alphabetically. It's probably easier to recognize who on that list have written books or TV shows targeted at the popular audience that it is to recognize which of them have won Nobels!

(Sylvester James Gates, Jr., on that list, is black. But is he important? I'm not a string theorist, and I only know about him because he taught at my alma mater.)