Who is more famous than Jesus? Clue: It’s not the Beatles.
The MIT Media Lab, via a project named Pantheon, has analyzed Wikipedia pages and number of page views to determine the most famous people in history. As a threshold, to be considered famous enough to be ranked by Pantheon an individual must have a Wikipedia page in at least 25 different languages. This consists of 11,341 people as of May 2013 (last time data set was run). From there, Pantheon uses various factors in an algorithm to calculate relative popularity rank.
The MIT Pantheon website is pretty cool, you can slice and dice data in all sorts of ways: MIT Pantheon Website. Below are some interesting results from Pantheon.
25 Most Famous People
- Aristotle
- Plato
- Jesus Christ
- Socrates
- Alexander the Great
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Confucius
- Julius Caesar
- Homer
- Pythagoras
- Archimedes
- Moses
- Muhammad
- Abraham
- Adolf Hitler
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- Charlemagne
- William Shakespeare
- Michelangelo
- Augustus
- Napoleon Bonaparte
- Isaac Newton
- Albert Einstein
- Christopher Columbus
- Johann Sebastian Bach
10 Most Common Domains (Professions)
- Politician
- Actor
- Writer
- Soccer Player
- Religious Figure
- Singer
- Musician
- Philosopher
- Physicist
- Composer
Top Birth Countries For Famous People
- United States
- United Kingdom
- France
- Italy
- Germany
- Russia
- Spain
- Turkey
- Poland
- The Netherlands
- Greece
- Austria
- Japan
- Sweden
- India
- Brazil
- Ukraine
Most Famous Americans
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Elvis Presley
- Marilyn Monroe
- Walt Disney
- Benjamin Franklin
- Edgar Allen Poe
- George Washington
- Thomas Edison
- Abraham Lincoln
- Jimi Hendrix
Most Famous St. Louisians
- Miles Davis
- Chuck Berry
- T. S. Eliot
- Josephine Baker
- William S. Burroughs
- Vincent Price
- William Holden
- Shelley Winters
- Roger D. Kornberg
- Kevin Kline
Most Famous Musicians
- Jimi Hendrix
- Bob Marley
- Bob Dylan
- John Lennon
- Louis Armstrong
- Paul McCartney
- Niccolo Paganini
- Franz Liszt
- Eric Clapton
- Ray Charles
Various Most Famous
Cyclist: Eddy Merckx
Golfer: Tiger Woods
Baseball Player: Babe Ruth
Economist: Karl Marx
Astronomer: Galileo
Computer Scientist: Alan Turing
Model: Twiggy
Writer: Homer
Architect: Imhotep
Roger Kornberg? How do we claim him? What of the 12 or so other Nobel Prize winners that lived AND were educated in St Louis? What of Joseph Pulitzer, Ellie Klemper, John Hamm, Sterling Brown, karlie Kloss, Jonathan Franzen etc?
Love2Nap
Get point. The MIT list is by birth city.
The Lindy effect seems to apply to fame.
Siri gave this list:
1-Jesus
2-Napoleon
3-Mohammed
4-William Shakespeare
5-Abraham Lincoln
6-George Washington
7-Adolf Hitler
8-Aristotle
9-Alexander the Great
10-Thomas Jefferson
Jesus seems to have an unfair advantage with more than 5 billion Bibles in print.
Yes! The rankings totally reflect the Lindy Effect. Longevity is one of the factors. And think – who is more likely to be famous in 1000 years Jesus and Plato or Jimi Hendrix and Donald Trump?