← Fame through time1946
1946
Whose working lives fell in 1946. 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 1946, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ronald Reagan9 decades - 2
Konstantin Chernenko4 decades - 3
Josef Mengele4 decades - 4
Tennessee Williams8 decades - 5
Georges Pompidou8 decades - 6
Ginger Rogers9 decades - 7
Vincent Price9 decades - 8
Lucille Ball8 decades - 9
Baba Vanga0 decades - 10
L. Ron Hubbard6 decades - 11
Võ Nguyên Giáp0 decades - 12
Juan Manuel Fangio7 decades - 13
Khalid of Saudi Arabia0 decades - 14
Emil Cioran3 decades - 15
Jack Ruby6 decades - 16
Hubert Humphrey8 decades - 17
William Golding7 decades - 18
Cantiflas9 decades - 19
Władysław Szpilman0 decades - 20
Naguib Mahfouz3 decades - 21
Marshall McLuhan7 decades - 22
Danny Kaye8 decades - 23
Joseph Barbera0 decades - 24
Merle Oberonnot measured- - 25
Klaus Fuchsnot 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.