Influential figures
People whose work changed what the rest of us do on the mat, in alphabetical order. Every claim is sourced, and where the record is contested — which in jiu-jitsu is often — the entry says so.
This is not a ranking. It is not ordered by anything except the alphabet, and nobody’s absence from it is a verdict.
1902-1994Carlos Gracie
He turned a few years of instruction in an Amazon theatre into an institution, and the machinery he built - an academy, a family, and a standing public challenge - is why one household's version of the art is the one that travelled.
4 sources- No portrait with a licence we can verify
Carlson Gracie
He replaced the private lesson with the group class and the family with the team, and in doing so invented the thing every competition academy now copies.
4 sources 
1913-2009Helio Gracie
He fought in public for three decades under rules that barely existed, and the losses in that record did more to shape what the family taught than the wins did.
5 sources
born 1985Kyra Gracie
She competed at the top of women's jiu-jitsu against the stated wishes of the family whose name is on the art, at a point when the women's divisions were small enough that visibility and survival were the same problem.
3 sources
born 1983Marcelo Garcia
He won at the top of no-gi grappling with a deliberately small set of positions, and then taught that set in public, which changed what a competitive game is expected to look like.
3 sources
1878-1941Mitsuyo Maeda
The Kodokan judoka whose club in Belem is the point where every Brazilian jiu-jitsu lineage claims to begin, and the point at which the documentation stops agreeing with itself.
5 sources- No portrait with a licence we can verify1921-2005
Oswaldo Fadda
He taught in the Rio suburbs rather than the wealthy south zone, and in 1951 his students beat the Gracie academy in public - which is why the sport has an argument about lineage at all.
4 sources 
born 1958Rickson Gracie
He took the family's claim to Japan in the mid-1990s and won there, and he is also the clearest case in the sport of a reputation that grew faster than the record behind it.
4 sources
born 1981Roger Gracie
He won at the highest level of the gi ruleset with the mount and the cross choke, the two things every beginner is taught in the first month, and made the case that the basics were never the problem.
4 sources
born 1966Royce Gracie
On one night in Denver in 1993 he won three fights in a total of under five minutes of mat time, in front of a paying audience and a camera, and the argument about whether grappling mattered was over.
5 sources