← Fame through time1920
1920
Whose working lives fell in 1920. 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 1920, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Srinivasa Ramanujan0 decades - 2
Niels Bohr10 decades - 3
Ezra Pound11 decades - 4
George S. Patton8 decades - 5
D. H. Lawrence11 decades - 6
Chester W. Nimitz8 decades - 7
Julius Streicher9 decades - 8
Princess Alice of Battenberg0 decades - 9
Faisal I of Iraq0 decades - 10
Albert Kesselring7 decades - 11
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Sinclair Lewis11 decades - 12
Roman von Ungern-Sternbergnot measured- - 13
Mikhail Frunze10 decades - 14
Tomoyuki Yamashitanot measured- - 15
François Mauriac11 decades - 16
Erich von Stroheim8 decades - 17
Clementine Churchillnot measured- - 18
Giacomo Matteottinot measured- - 19
György Lukács3 decades - 20
Alexander of Greece0 decades - 21
Theda Baranot measured- - 22
Heinrich Brüning9 decades - 23
Sacha Guitry12 decades - 24
John Reednot measured- - 25
Will Durant10 decades
How to read these rankings
- People sit in their own time. Everyone is placed in the century their working life belongs to, and never in one that came after their death.
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record, read across every language rather than one. 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. Those decades are closed, so each curve is measured once and kept.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, or a name belongs to more than one notable person, we would rather show nothing than guess.