Edmund Hillary

Hillary, a New Zealand beekeeper's son, caught the mountaineering bug in secondary school and made his first serious climb in 1939 on Mount Ollivier. World War II interrupted - he navigated for the Royal New Zealand Air Force and was wounded in an accident - but by 1951 he was back on big peaks, joining a British reconnaissance of Everest and a failed attempt on Cho Oyu the next year. The ninth British expedition in 1953, led by John Hunt, put him and Tenzing Norgay on the summit in May. Five years later he drove tractors to the South Pole as part of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and eventually made it to the North Pole too: the first person to stand at both ends of the earth and the top of Everest. From 1960 onward he poured his energy into the Himalayan Trust, building schools and hospitals across Nepal for the Sherpa communities. He served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh from 1985 to 1988, received the Order of the Garter in 1995, and was given a state funeral when he died in January 2008.