← Fame through time1940-1949
The 1940s
Whose names filled the books of the 1940s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in Hebrew books during the 1940s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Ahad Ha'am17 - 2Saadia Gaon11
- 3
Rav Ashi10 - 4
Haggai9.6 - 5
Sabbatai Zevi9.5 - 6
Josephus7.1 - 7
Johanan ben Zakai4.9 - 8
Habakkuk4.6 - 9
Hai Gaon4.6 - 10Simeon ben Gamliel II4.2
- 11Simeon ben Zoma3.9
- 12
Paul the Apostle3.6 - 13Nathan the Babylonian3.5
- 14
Hillel the Elder3.4 - 15Samuel ibn Naghrillah3.2
- 16Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg3.0
- 17Yanai2.6
- 18
Nathan of Gaza2.6 - 19
Isaac Abrabanel2.3 - 20
Baal Shem Tov2.2 - 21
Hayyim ben Joseph Vital2.2 - 22
Judas Maccabeus2.1 - 23
Rabbeinu Tam1.9 - 24
Menasseh Ben Israel1.8 - 25
Moses Sofer1.7
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1940s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ronald Reagan9 decades - 2
Richard Nixon8 decades - 3
Frida Kahlo8 decades - 4
Lyndon B. Johnson8 decades - 5
Alan Turing4 decades - 6
Gerald Ford6 decades - 7
Anne Frank7 decades - 8
Mother Teresa9 decades - 9
Leonid Brezhnev7 decades - 10
John Wayne9 decades - 11
Albert Camus8 decades - 12
Pope John Paul I2 decades - 13
Katharine Hepburn9 decades - 14
Rosa Parks6 decades - 15
Ayn Rand3 decades - 16
James Stewartnot measured- - 17
Adolf Eichmann8 decades - 18
Hedy Lamarr3 decades - 19
Bette Davis9 decades - 20
Wernher von Braun7 decades - 21
Hannah Arendt8 decades - 22
Jean-Paul Sartre9 decades - 23
Ian Fleming7 decades - 24
Vivien Leigh8 decades - 25
Akira Kurosawa6 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.