← Fame through time1947
1947
Whose working lives fell in 1947. 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 1947, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Alan Turing4 decades - 2
Pope John Paul I2 decades - 3
Wernher von Braun7 decades - 4
Milton Friedman9 decades - 5
Jackson Pollock7 decades - 6
Kim Il-sung8 decades - 7
Erich Honecker8 decades - 8
Gene Kelly8 decades - 9
James Callaghan8 decades - 10
Julia Child6 decades - 11
Otto von Habsburg9 decades - 12
Woody Guthrie8 decades - 13
Michelangelo Antonioni8 decades - 14
John Cage8 decades - 15
Lady Bird Johnson6 decades - 16
Karl Malden4 decades - 17
Kim Philbynot measured- - 18
Raoul Wallenberg4 decades - 19
José Ferrer1 decades - 20
Alfredo Stroessner7 decades - 21
Millvina Deannot measured- - 22
Carlo Ponti7 decades - 23
Pat Nixon5 decades - 24
Black Dahlianot measured- - 25
Jorge Amado8 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.