Best at 100

Coase's specialty is the economics and law of property rights. He brilliantly explained how private property rights give us incentives to cooperate productively in ways that went largely overlooked before he pointed them out. Before Coase published his most famous article -- his 1960 classic "The Problem of Social Cost" -- scholars never realized that (as I like to put it) legal rights are like cars.

But pioneering work is rarely presented cleanly, and Coase is a true pioneer.