He was a Czech king and Roman emperor; the most important Czech ruler (winner of the Greatest Czech poll). He grew up at the royal court in Paris, but unlike his father, John of Luxembourg, he did not put the interests of France above the needs of the Bohemian lands, which under his reign experienced unprecedented prosperity and prominence within the then Roman Empire. He promoted trade and crafts, education and the arts (he himself was one of the most educated medieval rulers, speaking and writing five languages fluently).  He founded the New Town of Prague, the University of Prague (which was later named after him) - the first higher education in Central Europe and many other important buildings in the Czech lands and elsewhere in Central Europe. 

He was a  theologian, philosopher and educator, founder of modern world pedagogy ("Teacher of the Nations"). He gained respect in this field during his lifetime, although it was originally a "by-product" of his philosophical teachings. He considered that one of the reasons for the bloody struggles in Europe (the Thirty Years' War) was that nations did not understand each other because they spoke different languages – hence his focus on language teaching (he created the very popular methodological manual "The Door of Languages Unlocked"). He gradually covered all education from young children to adulthood (with many writings on educational theory, didactics, encyclopaedic works, etc.). He was the first to define the exact structure of the educational system, and he placed great emphasis on education and an individual approach to pupils according to their abilities and nature. He considered the main principles to be illustration, adequacy, consistency and systematicity, activity and fun in teaching. As the last bishop of the Czech Protestant Church "Jednota bratrská", he spent most of his life in exile, meeting with leading European rulers, scholars and artists. 

He was the discoverer of the laws of heredity and founder of genetics, polyhistor (theologian and educator, mathematician, biologist, meteorologist and economist), monk, and later abbot of the Augustinian monastery in Brno. It was in the garden there that he carried out an extensive series of crosses of different pea varieties from 1856 to 1863 and deduced the basic principles of heredity, which he presented publicly in 1865 in Brno and published a year later. However, his groundbreaking findings were not appreciated until several decades later, when the findings he described were named Mendel's Laws of Heredity.

He was a composer of the High Romantic period, the most performed Czech composer in the world. In his rich symphonic, concertante, operatic, oratorio and chamber works, he applied Czech melodicism in a non-violent and original way to European musical thought in the second half of the 19th century. Similarly, he was able to use African-American and Native-American music as a strong source of inspiration during his three-year working stay in the USA (he accepted the position of director of the newly founded National Conservatory in New York). During his lifetime, he received many honours and ovations, was friends with other important composers (J. Brahms, H. von Büllow, G. Mahler, etc., who performed his compositions), and was elevated to aristocratic status by Emperor Franz Joseph I.

He was a scientist and politician, one of the main creators of Czechoslovakia and the first Czechoslovak president. Although from a poor family, TGM (a commonly used abbreviation of his name) studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna he studied philosophy, where he also taught, before continuing at Charles University in Prague. He was involved in the social scene, published in the professional and daily press, defended his scientifically-based opinions against hateful public opinion (the dispute over the Manuscripts, the Hilsneriad) and much more. He founded his own political party, and as a member of the Reichstag, he submitted a proposal for the establishment of a second Czech university in Brno. During the First World War, in exile (together with other personalities), he worked for the establishment of an independent state and published his vision of a united Europe. Gradually he gained the support of decisive politicians, including the American president W. Wilson, whom he convinced of the necessity to break up Austria-Hungary and advised him on his attitude towards Bolshevik Russia. He was elected president four times, serving until the age of 85, when he abdicated for health reasons.

He was an important Czech painter and graphic artist, active for many years in Paris and the USA. An accidental commission for a theatre poster made him famous virtually overnight at the age of thirty-five, and his distinctive symbolic and decorative drawings became an essential part of the world Art Nouveau movement, literally churning out paintings and designs for interiors, utilitarian objects and jewellery. Both originals and reproductions of his work are known to the professional public even today, and his handwriting has inspired artists of several generations.

He was one of the most successful and world-famous Czech entrepreneurs, the "King of Shoes", who built a global shoe empire from a small shoemaking workshop with factories in more than fifty countries on four continents. His company not only produced shoes but also sold them (Bata shops can still be found in the most exotic countries), and had its own power plant, transport and promotion (film studios). Thanks to Bata's efforts, the company's headquarters – Zlín – was transformed in the 1920s into a modern "garden" city with quality housing for workers and above-standard education and health care, and he initiated and promoted a number of transport projects that were beneficial for the whole of First Republic Czechoslovakia. 

He was a German writer living in Prague, almost unknown during his lifetime (most of his works were published posthumously), and today considered one of the most important authors of the 20th century. He was a clerk in an insurance company, but this work did not fulfil him much, although he was positively evaluated by his colleagues and superiors.  He lived a rather ascetic life himself, which included his relationships with women, but he was popular in society as an entertaining and sensitive person. All these real and apparent contradictions are reflected in his work – his novels America (The Missing), The Trial and The Castle, and numerous short stories and novellas. In them, the sense of social isolation and exclusion is often sharply contrasted with a humorous and even grotesque plot, which, however, usually ends tragically.   

He was a Czech writer, novelist, playwright and journalist, a leading figure of cultural and social life in interwar Czechoslovakia, and one of the most translated Czech writers. He is the author of several dozen books (some of which are a collection of his rich journalistic output) and several dramas in which he applied his lifelong belief in "the good in the common man", but at the same time warned against the abuse of power and technology (in the novels Krakatit, War with the Mlocks, dramas R.U.R., White Sickness. He is often ranked among the founders of modern science fiction literature). For many people, he was a symbol of the First Republic, but after Czechoslovakia had to cede its border territories to Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II, he became the main target of a hate campaign that apparently hastened his death (total exhaustion of the body after simultaneous flu, kidney inflammation and pneumonia).

He was a Czech chemist, scientist and inventor in the field of macromolecular organics, and achieved world fame mainly for his improvement of gel contact lenses and the discovery of artificial polyamide fibre - nylon. He got into chemistry by accident, as he originally wanted to study mechanical engineering, but a friend talked him out of it. He created the textile nylon fibre in the Bata Chemical Research Workshops when he was only 27 years old, and in 1963, after almost a decade of research at the Academy of Sciences, he completed his phenomenal discovery of gel contact lenses, which literally changed the world. While in a free society, the invention would have made him fabulously wealthy, in communist Czechoslovakia he was blacklisted for his political views and the state gave up valid patents and astronomical dollar amounts rather than have the invention associated with a name destined for oblivion.

He was a Czech athlete – long distance runner, holder of four gold Olympic medals and one silver one, and he set 13 world records. He became world famous at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, where he won the 5 and 10-kilometre races and the marathon race (he set world records in all disciplines at the same time), something no one else had ever done. At the same Olympics, his wife Dana won a gold medal in the javelin throw. Zátopek's life mirrors the paradoxes of the communist totalitarian period – in the 1950s, as an athlete and professional officer, he was a prominent member of the regime (and secretly cooperated with military counter-intelligence), but after 1968 he was expelled from the army and had to work hard.

He is a Czech-French writer, poet, playwright, prose writer and essayist, and is one of the most translated contemporary Czech authors. At the beginning of his literary career, he was one of the prominent authors of the communist regime, but his ideas were definitively rejected after the violent end of the Prague Spring, just as he broke with the mainstream of domestic dissent before emigrating to France, and his relations with his native country remain somewhat controversial to this day (among other things, he did not allow translations of his French-language works into Czech for decades). His best-known works include The Jest, Ridiculous Loves, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality, and the dramas The Owners of the Keys and James and His Master.

He was a Czech-American film director and screenwriter. As one of the most prominent representatives of the new Czechoslovak film wave, he gained respect abroad (he won his first award at a prestigious film festival in 1964), and soon his film Love of a Mermaid (Lásky jedna plavovlásky) was nominated for an Academy Award, as was his subsequent film It's burning, my doll (Hoří, má panenko). In the early 1970s, Forman went to the USA, where he developed his talent to the full, and the films he directed went on to win numerous Oscars and other prestigious awards (notably One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hair, Ragtime, Amadeus, Valmont, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Goya's Ghosts).

He was a playwright, dissident and politician, the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003), an important symbol of social change at home and abroad. As a playwright and politician, he came to prominence in the 1960s, but after the suppression of the Prague Spring he was not allowed to publish or act publicly (already in the 1950s he had a difficult situation due to his "bourgeois" background). He became one of the leading representatives of Charter 77 and other civic initiatives, and abroad he became the main representative of the Czechoslovak Republic. He played a decisive role during the Velvet Revolution. For the West, he became (together with Lech Wałęsa) a symbol of the return of Eastern European countries to democracy. At home, however, some of his decisions and attitudes were controversial among the public and his former Dissent colleagues (large-scale amnesties and some controversial individual pardons, attitudes towards the Sudeten Germans, the bombing of Yugoslavia, etc.). 

She is a Czech-American professional tennis player, one of the most successful tennis players of all time in singles and doubles (she lost only 219 of almost fifteen hundred singles matches, and the ratio is 747–143 in doubles). She began playing tennis under the guidance of her stepfather and soon rose to the top of the junior rankings,  representing Czechoslovakia abroad. After the 1975 U.S. Open, she applied for U.S. citizenship there, received her green card within weeks, and began representing the United States, including in the 2004 Olympics. She was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000, six years before her professional career officially ended, and continues to coach.