← Fame through time1945
1945
Whose working lives fell in 1945. 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 1945, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Anne Frank7 decades - 2
Mother Teresa9 decades - 3
Akira Kurosawa6 decades - 4
Eva Braun8 decades - 5
Jacques Cousteau5 decades - 6
David Niven9 decades - 7
Gloria Stuart2 decades - 8
Paulette Goddard8 decades - 9
Chiang Ching-kuo9 decades - 10
Giuseppe Meazza3 decades - 11
Django Reinhardt7 decades - 12
Nathuram Godse1 decades - 13
Clara Petacci8 decades - 14
Irena Sendler0 decades - 15
William Hanna5 decades - 16
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar0 decades - 17
Jean Genet8 decades - 18
Joan Bennettnot measured- - 19
Irma Gresenot measured- - 20
Konrad Zuse6 decades - 21
Ingrid of Swedennot measured- - 22
William Bradford Shockley7 decades - 23
Samuel Barbernot measured- - 24
El|pelonchasnot measured- - 25
Margot Franknot measured-
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.