← Fame through time1950-1959
The 1950s
Whose names filled the books of the 1950s - 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 1950s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Zhou Enlai173 - 2
Mao Zedong100 - 3
Lu Xun55 - 4
Liu Shaoqi43 - 5
Sun Yat-sen24 - 6
Li Peng17 - 7
Zhu De9.0 - 8
Deng Xiaoping8.4 - 9
Jiang Zemin5.6 - 10Gao Ming5.4
- 11
Soong Ching-ling4.7 - 12
Lin Biao4.3 - 13
Confucius3.9 - 14
Laozi3.3 - 15
Jiang Qing2.5 - 16
Du Fu2.3 - 17
Yuan Shikai2.1 - 18
Li Bai1.7 - 19
Qu Yuan1.5 - 20
Park Chung-hee1.4 - 21
Cao Xueqin1.3 - 22
Pu Songling1.1 - 23Li Si1.1
- 24
Kang Youwei0.96 - 25
Bada Shanren0.93
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1950s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
John F. Kennedy11 decades - 2
Jimmy Carter7 decades - 3
Pope John Paul II5 decades - 4
George H. W. Bush2 decades - 5
Nelson Mandela6 decades - 6
Judy Garland9 decades - 7
Marlon Brando7 decades - 8
Frank Sinatra8 decades - 9
Indira Gandhi7 decades - 10
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh0 decades - 11
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi4 decades - 12
Henry Kissinger7 decades - 13
Christopher Lee6 decades - 14
Roald Dahl6 decades - 15
Isaac Asimov7 decades - 16
Ingrid Bergman8 decades - 17
James Dean9 decades - 18
Richard Feynman4 decades - 19
Nicolae Ceaușescunot measured- - 20
Orson Welles9 decades - 21
Lee Kuan Yew7 decades - 22
Kirk Douglas8 decades - 23
Eva Perón8 decades - 24
Édith Piaf6 decades - 25
Charles Bronson5 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.