The shortlist

The Banknote Character Advisory Committee, with the help of public focus groups, created a shortlist of 12 options. These were:

Mary Anning (1799-1847) – a self-taught palaeontologist known around the world for the fossil discoveries she made in her hometown of Lyme Regis.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984) – whose research revolutionised our understanding of the universe’s smallest matter.

Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) – who drove the discovery of DNA’s structure, a critical breakthrough in our understanding of the biology of life.

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) – who made outstanding contributions to our understanding of gravity, space and time.

William (1738-1822) and Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) – a brother and sister astronomy team devoted to uncovering the secrets of the universe.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) – whose research using x-ray crystallography delivered ground-breaking discoveries which shaped modern science and helped save lives.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) and Charles Babbage (1791-1871) – visionaries who imagined the computer age.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) – who made discoveries which laid the foundations for technological innovations which have transformed our way of life.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) – whose incredible talent for numbers helped transform modern mathematics.

Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937) – who uncovered the properties of radiation, revealed the secrets of the atom and laid the foundations for nuclear physics.

Frederick Sanger (1918-2013) – whose pioneering research laid the foundations for our understanding of genetics.

Alan Turing (1912-1954) – whose work on early computers, code-breaking achievements and visionary ideas about machine intelligence made him one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.