1. Franz Kafka

Kafka was born in Prague in a German-speaking Jewish family. He is considered to be one of the major literary figures of the 20^th century, giving rise to a literary term “Kafkaesque”, which means imbued with the surreal, absurd and yet ironic qualities of Kafka’s novels.

2. Antonín Dvorák

The first Bohemian composer to achieve success and recognition worldwide, Dvorák is best known for his Symphony No. 9 in E Minor From The New World, or The New World Symphony. Much of his music was inspired by the folk traditions of Moravia and Bohemia, and he skilfully incorporated those elements into his Romanic style.

3. Milan Kundera

Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now Czechia or Czech Republic), Kundera shot to international fame after the publication of his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The novel is set mainly in Prague and explores the time of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968.

4. Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lím

If you wear contact lenses, you should thank Czech chemists Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lím who invented the soft lens in 1959 and the synthetic material polyhydroxyethylmethacrylate that is used for soft contact lenses.

5. Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright (née Marie Jana Korbelová) was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 11. She is the first female US Secretary of State and served from 1997 until 2001.

6. Karel Capek

Karel Capek was a Czech science fiction writer who first introduced the word “robot” in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) in 1920. Although he is often believed to be the inventor of the word, Capek credited his brother Josef as the person who first came up with “roboti” – “robots” in English.

7. Gerty and Carl Cori

Gerty and Carl Cori, both born in Prague, were scientists who received a Nobel Prize in 1947 for their discovery of how glycogen is broken down and re-synthesised in the body to be used as energy. They met during their studies at Charles University in Prague, in an anatomy class, and moved to the United States in 1922.

8. Max Wertheimer

Max Wertheimer is known as the father of Gestalt psychology, together with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. Another Prague native, Werthermer was born in 1880 and studied at the University of Berlin and later at the University of Würzburg. He began his experiments in 1910, which led to the discovery of the phi phenomenon in 1912. A good example of the phi phenomenon is a flip book that creates the illusion of moving images when the pages are flipped rapidly.

9. Martina Navrátilová

Martina Navrátilová is a Czech-American tennis player who won 18 Grand Slam singles titles and 31 women’s doubles titles, as well as 10 major mixed double titles. Combined, these make an unbeaten record for the most number of Grand Slams ever won by a tennis player, male or female. Born in Prague in 1956, Navratilova immigrated to the United States aged 19. She was one of the first sports figures to come out as gay, becoming a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights.

10. Jan Purkyne

Jan Purkyne is famous for numerous scientific discoveries which include Purkinje cells, Purkinje fibres, plasma, and protoplasm. He was born in Bohemia and graduated from Charles University in Prague. Purkyne created the first Department of Physiology in the world at the University of Breslau, Prussia.

By Maia Nikitina