1 Terry: {admiring the view as they walk across the Himalayas} Nice countryside you have around here.
2 Yeti: Yes, we like it.
3 Yeti: Sir Edmund enjoyed the local terrain when he visited, of course.
4 Terry: Hillary?
4 Yeti: More mountainy, he called it, actually.

Sir Edmund Hillary is of course the mountaineer who was, in 1953, the first person to climb Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on Earth, accompanied by the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. Since then, Sir Edmund has devoted much of his time to working to improve the living conditions and educational standards of the Sherpa people of the Himalayas, and to protect the ecology and unique geography of the region.

Climbing a mountain does not in itself make one a great person. But Sir Edmund is much more than a mountaineer. He is a philanthropist of the first degree, dedicating his life to helping others. It would be nice if more people remembered him for that, than for "knocking the bastard off."*

* Hillary's first words on returning to base camp after his successful climb: "Well George, we finally knocked the bastard off."

The other unfortunate thing about Sir Edmund's fame is that many people do not know his nationality. He is very likely the most widely famous New Zealander in history - but relatively few people know that fact about him. (Though I expect all diligent readers to know it, after poll 219. And this annotation.)

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2017-01-21 Rerun commentary: The other great New Zealander is Ernest Rutherford, possibly the greatest experimental nuclear physicist ever. When you have an entire chemical element named after you, you know you've done good. What did Rutherford do? I'm glad you asked.

• Experimented with early radio waves, being the first person to show that they could be detected over distances as great as half a mile. This work was later extended by Guglielmo Marconi.
• Worked on detection of submarines using the earliest sonar systems.
• Worked with J.J. Thomson on the research that led to the discovery of the electron.
• Differentiated between alpha and beta decays for the first time.
• Showed that radiation came in three distinct types by showing that alpha and beta radiation were fundamentally different from X-rays.
• Worked with Frederick Soddy in the discovery that thorium gave off a gas which they discovered was an isotope of radon.
• Discovered a new isotope of thorium.
• Discovered the concept of radioactive half-lives.
• Developed the theory that radioactivity was caused by atoms disintegrating.
• Named gamma rays and showed that they were a third type of radiation caused by nuclear decays.
• Proved that alpha and beta radioactive decays transmuted one element into a different element.
• Showed experimentally that alpha particles are helium nuclei.
• Worked with Hans Geiger to develop scintillation screens and cloud chambers to detect radiation particles.
• Modelled and explained Rutherford scattering - the pattern of scattering angles from subatomic particles fired at atoms.
• Developed the Rutherford model of the atom, the first model to suggest that most of the mass of an atom is contained in a dense nucleus, with only a very small fraction of mass in the remaining volume.
• Led the research which led to the "splitting of the atom" - the first human-initiated nuclear reaction.
• Posited that hydrogen nuclei were a fundamental building block of atoms, thus discovering the proton.
• Developed the theory pointing to the existence of a neutral subatomic particle, and then led the research team that discovered the existence of the neutron. This completed Rutherford's trifecta of having an active hand in the discovery of all three major subatomic particles.
• Realised that the energy released by artificially induced nuclear reactions was huge, and so could potentially be used as a source of power, but only if a way could be found to induce the reaction without an energy-inefficient particle accelerator - thus paving the way for theories of sustained nuclear chain reactions and atomic power.
• Directly petitioned the New Zealand Government to support scientific research, resulting in the creation of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.
• Served as President of the Royal Society from 1925 until his death in 1930.

In fact he did most of this stuff, including his most important work, after he won his Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It's something of an injustice that he wasn't also awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics.