← 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 Chinese books during the 1940s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Mao Zedong28 - 2
Cao Xueqin25 - 3
Zhou Enlai9.6 - 4
Confucius6.6 - 5
Lin Biao6.1 - 6
Deng Xiaoping5.3 - 7
Liu Shaoqi3.3 - 8
Lu Xun2.7 - 9
Zhu De2.3 - 10
Jiang Qing2.1 - 11
Sun Yat-sen1.7 - 12
Zhao Ziyang0.62 - 13
Li Peng0.60 - 14
Jiang Zemin0.53 - 15
Soong Ching-ling0.34 - 16Gao Ming0.21
- 17
Hua Guofeng0.19 - 18
Qu Yuan0.17 - 19
Chen-ning Yang0.15 - 20
Zhuang Zhou0.11 - 21
Lin Tse-hsu0.11 - 22
Hu Jintao0.09 - 23
Kang Youwei0.09 - 24
Li Qingzhao0.08 - 25
Laozi0.08
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.