Kurt Lewin

Born in Prussia in 1890, Lewin trained in Berlin before fleeing to the United States as the Reich closed in. He landed at Cornell, then Iowa, then MIT, carrying a conviction that psychology shouldn't just describe the world but change it. His research focused on applied problems—how groups make decisions, how organizations evolve, how action and inquiry could fold into one process. The work earned him a reputation as the founder of social psychology and a place among the first to study group dynamics seriously. A 2002 survey ranked him the 18th-most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.…