Maya Lin

Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio, in 1959 to parents who had come from China. In 1981, at twenty one and still an undergraduate at Yale, she entered a blind national competition for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and beat more than 1,400 other entries with a drawing of a cut in the ground. The design was attacked at first, and it has become one of the most moving places in Washington.

Two walls of black granite, each about 247 feet long, point to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and carry more than 58,000 names in the order the soldiers died. Walk in from either end and the path slopes down as the panels rise past your head. On our Yale walk, her Women's Table on Cross Campus marks the history of women at the university, and in New York her building for the Museum of Chinese in America, from 2009, is a stop on the Chinatown walk.