Born on July 4, 1970

He painted a single vertical line on a monochrome canvas and called it *Onement I*. Critics laughed. Barnett Newman didn't care—he'd spent years thinking about what painting could mean after the Holocaust, after the bomb. His "zip" paintings, those stark stripes bisecting fields of color, sold for almost nothing during his lifetime. Today one fetched $43.8 million at auction. And museums worldwide display those lines as meditations on the sublime, on dividing light from darkness. He left behind the idea that a painting doesn't need to look like anything to mean everything.

He invented contract bridge on a steamship cruise in 1925, scribbling the rules that would replace auction bridge in living rooms worldwide within five years. Harold Stirling Vanderbilt defended the America's Cup three times without losing a single race—Enterprise in 1930, Rainbow in 1934, Ranger in 1937. The great-grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt died at 86, leaving behind a card game played by 25 million Americans and a yacht racing record that stood as the sport's gold standard. The railroad fortune bought the boats. The mind won the races.