← Fame through time1500-1599
The 16th century
Whose working lives fell in the 16th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 16th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Nicolaus Copernicus8 decades - 2
Nostradamus22 decades - 3
Giordano Bruno22 decades - 4
John Calvin22 decades - 5
Francis Bacon22 decades - 6
Huldrych Zwingli9 decades - 7
John Dee22 decades - 8
William Tyndale21 decades - 9
Gerardus Mercator0 decades - 10
John Napier22 decades - 11
Wang Yangming8 decades - 12
Katharina von Bora21 decades - 13
Gerolamo Cardano19 decades - 14
Jean Bodin22 decades - 15
Judah Loew ben Bezalel0 decades - 16
Francysk Skaryna16 decades - 17
Francisco de Vitoria21 decades - 18
Menno Simons18 decades - 19
Ulrich von Hutten22 decades - 20
François Viète0 decades - 21
Simon Stevin20 decades - 22
Bernardino de Sahagún14 decades - 23
Ahmad Sirhindi1 decades - 24
Johann Tetzel20 decades - 25
Jacobus Arminius0 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.