← Fame through time1600-1699
The 17th century
Whose working lives fell in the 17th 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 17th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Isaac Newton22 decades - 2
René Descartes22 decades - 3
John Locke22 decades - 4
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz15 decades - 5
Baruch Spinoza16 decades - 6
Blaise Pascal22 decades - 7
Johannes Kepler18 decades - 8
Thomas Hobbes22 decades - 9
Miyamoto Musashi2 decades - 10
Robert Hooke22 decades - 11
Christiaan Huygens7 decades - 12
Robert Boyle22 decades - 13
Pierre de Fermat8 decades - 14
Hugo Grotius22 decades - 15
Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon22 decades - 16
Johan de Witt0 decades - 17
Jacob Bernoulli22 decades - 18
Jakob Böhme22 decades - 19
Athanasius Kircher21 decades - 20
Tommaso Campanella22 decades - 21
George Fox22 decades - 22
Roger Williams22 decades - 23
Anne Hutchinson20 decades - 24
Giovanni Domenico Cassininot measured- - 25
Guillaume de l'Hôpitalnot measured-
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.