The St. Andrews site is an invaluable resource. From that list, I picked (usually) at most one great mathematician born in each year from 1860 to 1910:
$\textbf{EDIT: By popular demand, the list now extends from 1849 to 1920.}$
1849: Felix Klein, Ferdinand Georg Frobenius
1850: Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya
1851: honorable mention: Schottky
1852: William Burnside
1853: honorable mentions: Maschke, Ricci-Curbastro, Schoenflies
1854: Henri Poincare
1856: Emile Picard (honorable mention: Stieltjes)
1857: honorable mention: Bolza
1858: Giuseppe Peano (honorable mention: Goursat)
1859: Adolf Hurwitz (honorable mention: Holder)
1860: Vito Volterra
1861: honorable mention: Hensel
1862: David Hilbert
1864: Hermann Minkowski
1865: Jacques Hadamard (honorable mention: Castelnuovo)
1868: Felix Hausdorff
1869: Elie Cartan
1871: Emile Borel (honorable mentions: Enriques, Steinitz, Zermelo)
1873: honorable mentions: Caratheodory, Levi-Civita, Young
1874: Leonard Dickson
1875: Henri Lebesgue (honorable mentions: Schur, Takagi)
1877: Godfrey Harold Hardy
1878: Max Dehn
1879: honorable mentions: Hahn, Severi
1880: Frigyes Riesz
1881: Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer
1882: Emmy Amalie Noether (honorable mentions: Sierpinski, Wedderburn)
1884: George Birkhoff, Solomon Lefschetz
1885: Hermann Weyl (honorable mention: Littlewood)
1887: Erich Hecke (honorable mentions: Polya, Ramanujan, Skolem)
1888: Louis Joel Mordell (honorable mention: Alexander)
1891: Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov
1892: Stefan Banach
1894: Norbert Wiener
1895: honorable mention: Bergman
1896: Carl Ludwig Siegel (honorable mention: Kuratowski)
1897: honorable mention: Jesse Douglas
1898: Emil Artin, Helmut Hasse (honorable mentions: Kneser, Urysohn)
1899: Oscar Zariski (honorable mentions: Bochner, Krull, Ore)
1900: Antoni Zygmund
1901: Richard Brauer
1902: Alfred Tarski (honorable mention: Hopf)
1903: John von Neumann (hm's: Hodge, Kolmogorov, de Rham, Segre, Stone, van der Waerden)
1904: Henri Cartan (honorable mentions: Hurewicz, Whitehead)
1905: Abraham Adrian Albert
1906: Kurt Godel, Andre Weil (honorable mentions: Dieudonne, Feller, Leray, Zorn)
1907: Lars Ahlfors, Hassler Whitney (honorable mentions: Coxeter, Deuring)
1908: Lev Pontrjagin
1909: Claude Chevalley, Saunders Mac Lane (honorable mentions: Stiefel, Ulam)
1910: Nathan Jacobson (honorable mention: Steenrod)
1911: Shiing-shen Chern (honorable mentions: Birkhoff, Chow, Kakutani, Witt)
1912: Alan Mathison Turing (honorable mentions: Eichler, Zassenhaus)
1913: Samuel Eilenberg, Paul Erdos, Israil Moiseevich Gelfand (dis/honorable mention: Teichmuller)
1914: honorable mentions: Dantzig, Dilworth, Kac
1915: Kunihiko Kodaira (honorable mentions: Hamming, Linnik, Tukey)
1916: Claude Elwood Shannon (honorable mention: Mackey)
1917: Atle Selberg (honorable mentions: Iwasawa, Kaplansky)
1918: Abraham Robinson
1919: honorable mention: Julia Robinson
1920: Alberto Calderon
The skein relation approach to knot invariants was not very popular before the Jones polynomial. The Alexander polynomial was thought of as coming from homology (of the cyclic branched cover); Conway had found the skein relation, but it was not well-known. Of course once you start investigating skein relations systematically, you rapidly find the Jones, Kauffman, and HOMFLY relations.
Basically, people had been looking for invariants using their standard tools like homology, and had trouble constructing interesting invariants that way. The idea of just looking for a skein relation was new. The notion of "polynomial invariants" by itself is too vague to give a place to look.
Best Answer
Google found this:
Notices of the AMS, September 1998, p. 979:
Bill Casselman's review of POLYHEDRA by Cromwell,
we find the phrase "the one great book by Bourbaki"