I wonder how much of this ultimately comes down to branding. Einstein has a memorable name, a memorable haircut/photograph, and also managed to have his name become a byword for “genius.”
> Our time, he added, "is Gothic in its spirit. Unlike the Renaissance, it is not dominated by a few outstanding personalities. The twentieth century has established the democracy of the intellect. In the republic of art and science there are many men who take an equally important part in the intellectual movements of our age. It is the epoch rather than the individual that is important. There is no one dominant personality like Galileo or Newton".
Now, there was probably a good deal of fake modesty in that statement - he was a fairly dominant personality in the first part of the 20th century. But I suspect a key reason Einstein continues to be a widely recognizable name is that current scientists (physicists etc., those who are most equipped to rank / perpetuate his status) continue being in awe of the singular nature of his contributions, more so than any of the other "greats" of that period.
Why so? He could not have predicted it himself back then, but more than a century later his work would not have been "normalized". There was no subsequent breakthrough in fundamental physics that would somehow link geometry/gravity with the rest of the physics "stuff" (or vice-versa). As he relates in the interview, during that time (1929) he was working on a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism but his language suggests he was not at all confident. Till this day the mental models he introduced to help us grasp the workings of the universe remain a thing apart.
Of course in the grand scheme of things Einstein was probably more influential, but I was more commenting on the fact that Einstein has become a kind of memetic symbol in himself, a bit like Ché, whereas the others haven’t. (Most people probably can’t even name more than a handful of people from WW1.) Maybe that only happened because his work was so impactful, but does the average person really know much about relativity? I was trying to find a paper that traced how Einstein became synonymous with genius but couldn’t come up with anything.
Not of their impact on world history, no, but we are discussing more how the idea of someone lives on after they are dead and for how long, so maybe in that context it maybe deserves to be dismissed, as in there's a reason those figures are not referenced or talked about as much as Einstein is.
So he certainly had an impact, I’m not sure if I would use the term accomplishment though.