We asked our readers to nominate their Person of the Year for 2012, in response to ideas from our editors and staff. From scientific and Olympic heroes to the tongue-in-cheek suggestion Psy, the composer of Gangnam Style, the suggestions came flooding in. Here are the six most popular choices, with reasons given by our commenters. You can vote for your favourite below and the favourite will become the Guardian's Person of the Year 2012.

Put forward originally by Lucy Lamble, global development editor, this choice was backed by a number of readers including hughtorpey:

I would nominate Malala Yousafzai, for the simple reason that she is fighting for education for all, which is the first step on universal progress. Her bravery really is incredible, as are her family

GuyanaBoy:

I fully support the nomination of Malala Yousafzai for Person of the Year 2012 because - as a 14-year old and younger - Malala is at a very impressionable age, and therefore, she is doing an exemplary job of standing outside the box and breaking the mould of misogyny by refusing to accept the inferior status of women that has been foisted upon girls and women for thousands of years within her culture, and girls and women in general, everywhere on this planet. Malala for Person of the Year 2012 for standing up for women's rights against all odds!

Bradley Manning

Nominated by mhenri:

Bradley Manning, who after blowing a very necessary whistle, has survived yet another year of cruel and unusual pretrial punishment at the hand of the US military, which was designed to break him psychologically....

Michael Meo

I nominate Bradley Manning. He has maintained his stance for democratic use of information, despite immense pressure put upon him physically, morally, and psychologically, by his superiors in the armed forces up to and including the President of the United states





Pussy Riot

Nominated by stuv:

Pussy Riot AND Yousafzai because they both resisted totalitarianism and both paid a price for so doing. And because totalitarianism of whatever variety is the greatest threat to all our hopes for health and happiness in this 21stC.

Staceyb:

Pussy Riot... some amazing women paying a price for speaking out against a corrupt regime





Danny Boyle

Suggested by Alex Needham, culture editor, and nominated by reader Mary2006:

For me it has to be Danny Boyle - for defining Britain in a way I recognised and could celebrate and be proud of. It was a glorious moment amidst all that nonsense about monarchy. It set the tone for people who didn't expect to engage with the Olympics to feel as though it actually did have something for them after all.

Helen121:

Danny Boyle - he managed to bring some unity to some very disparate national groups and made us all feel good about Britain in a very positive and non-jingoistic way. Only some real extremists hated it.





Fabiola Gianotti

Suggested originally by Ian Sample, science correspondent, Gianotti was also nominated by badbadthepirate:

Simply put; in such politically tense times where nations are divided and our young uphold the superficial and vapid as celebrity, we need to embrace and endorse the unifying power of science to better our lives and answer questions bigger than "How good do I look?" or "How fast can I run".

studentgrant75:

I'm a member of the other big collaboration experiment at CERN, called CMS. So it would seem proper that Joe Incandela, the spokesperson for the CMS collaboration would be nominated alongside the ATLAS spokesperson, Fabiola Gianotti. Both experiments produced the result that was presented to the world on the 4th of July.

We are a big community and it's nice that people would talk about the discovery of "The Boson" in the same berth as the bravery of Malala Yousafzai.

Fabiola and Joe are the heads of the hydra, with its internal organs powered by thousands of scientists and technicians from all over the world





Nate Silver

Nominated by SonOfTheDesert: