The book of Dmitry Travin and Otar Margania is a story about state reforms through the biographies of the people who carried them out. Short stories simply and intelligibly tell how and why the world changed. The book covers a huge time span from the era of the English Queen Elizabeth to the Russian reformers of the 20th century. Geographically, the book represents the whole world: it represents all the significant world reformers of Europe, Asia and America. And most importantly, the attention of the authors is paid not only to the practices of state reform, but also to great scientists, without whose work it is difficult to imagine modernization.