BKS Iyengar

Indian yoga master who, more than any other figure, shaped the global understanding of yoga as a precise, alignment-based postural practice. A frail child saved from tuberculosis by yoga, he studied with his brother-in-law T. Krishnamacharya and from 1937 taught yoga in Pune, India for over seven decades. His 1966 book Light on Yoga, the foundational reference of modern yoga, has sold over three million copies and been translated into more than nineteen languages. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. His exacting precision, his use of props (now standard equipment in nearly every yoga studio), and his deep philosophical grounding in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali made him both the great democratizer of yoga and one of its most rigorous teachers.