← 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 - 26
Augusto Pinochet5 decades - 27
Stan Lee3 decades - 28
Maria Callas1 decades - 29
Gregory Peck8 decades - 30
François Mitterrand8 decades - 31
Lauren Bacall8 decades - 32
Rita Hayworth8 decades - 33
Carl Reiner6 decades - 34
Charles Aznavour8 decades - 35
Yitzhak Rabin9 decades - 36
Pete Seeger7 decades - 37
Doris Day8 decades - 38
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn6 decades - 39
Truman Capote8 decades - 40
Kurt Vonnegut6 decades - 41
Gamal Abdel Nasser8 decades - 42
Charlton Heston7 decades - 43
Dean Martin10 decades - 44
Ferdinand Marcos6 decades - 45
Arthur Miller11 decades - 46
Betty White7 decades - 47
Ava Gardner8 decades - 48
Richard Attenborough7 decades - 49
Pier Paolo Pasolini8 decades - 50
Robert Mugabe5 decades - 51
Harold Wilson11 decades - 52
Pierre Trudeau6 decades - 53
Ingmar Bergman6 decades - 54
Anwar Sadat5 decades - 55
Atal Bihari Vajpayee5 decades - 56
Mikhail Kalashnikov4 decades - 57
Helmut Schmidt9 decades - 58
Zsa Zsa Gabor7 decades - 59
Jack Kerouac6 decades - 60
Federico Fellini8 decades - 61
Billie Holiday8 decades - 62
Arthur C. Clarke7 decades - 63
Charles Bukowski5 decades - 64
Edmund Hillary7 decades - 65
Buddy Holly5 decades - 66
J. D. Salinger7 decades - 67
Olivia de Havilland9 decades - 68
Anthony Quinn7 decades - 69
Ravi Shankar6 decades - 70
James Baldwin10 decades - 71
Billy Graham7 decades - 72
Ray Bradbury7 decades - 73
Yul Brynner7 decades - 74
Katherine Johnsonnot measured- - 75
Raj Kapoor5 decades - 76
Shimon Peres8 decades - 77
Robert Mitchum8 decades - 78
Rosalind Franklin4 decades - 79
Satyajit Ray6 decades - 80
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia0 decades - 81
Mickey Rooney9 decades - 82
Nancy Reagan4 decades - 83
Ernest Borgnine7 decades - 84
Marcello Mastroianni7 decades - 85
Ella Fitzgerald8 decades - 86
Peter Ustinov8 decades - 87
John Glenn10 decades - 88
William Holden11 decades - 89
Suharto6 decades - 90
Frank Herbertnot measured- - 91
Toshiro Mifune5 decades - 92
Nat King Cole6 decades - 93
Hank Williams7 decades - 94
Aldo Moro8 decades - 95
Chen-ning Yang8 decades - 96
Leonard Bernstein8 decades - 97
Andrei Sakharov5 decades - 98
Walter Matthau6 decades - 99
Montgomery Clift8 decades - 100
Spiro Agnew6 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.