George Takei is a Japanese-American author, actor, director and social commentator. He became famous through his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek, but has since become a vocal LGBT spokesperson and activist.

Takei has been involved in numerous campaigns, including to make the American Boy Scouts Association to drop its anti-gay policy and a campaign aimed at California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he vetoed sex-sex marriage legislation. His use of humour to share important LGBT messages via Facebook has made him very popular, with over 8 million followers.

bell hooks is an American author, critic, and social activist. As a founder and leader of intersectional feminist theory, her work focuses on the connections between gender, race and class. hooks, a bisexual woman, has published over 30 books, one of her most notable being Ain’t I a Woman? named after Sojourner Truth’s speech.

The main areas of hooks’ study are media, film, education and history. When asked ‘what is a feminist?’, hooks asserts that it is “rooted in neither fear nor fantasy… Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression’.

Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf became one of the most prolific writers of modernist fiction in the 20^th century. Her most notable works include Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse. She also wrote the seminal essay A Room of One’s Own, which continues to be a founding piece of feminist literature to this day.

Woolf had a relationship with Vita Sackville-West, another writer, who was at the heart of her novel Orlando. The novel is an exploration of gender and time, with the eponymous character weaving seamlessly between both.

Alan Turing, born 1912, was the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. During the Second World War he worked for the government in Bletchley Park, the UK’s codebreaking centre. His invaluable contribution and that of his colleagues is thought to have shortened the war in Europe by up to four years.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts. To avoid prison, his punishment was chemical castration through oestrogen injections. In 2013 Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon.