← Fame through time1951
1951
Whose working lives fell in 1951. 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 1951, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Roald Dahl6 decades - 2
François Mitterrand8 decades - 3
Kirk Douglas8 decades - 4
Gregory Peck8 decades - 5
Harold Wilson11 decades - 6
Olivia de Havilland9 decades - 7
Aldo Moro8 decades - 8
Edward Heath7 decades - 9
Claude Shannon6 decades - 10
João Havelange0 decades - 11
Robert McNamara6 decades - 12
Glenn Ford8 decades - 13
Jackie Gleason7 decades - 14
Lyudmila Pavlichenko5 decades - 15
Ferruccio Lamborghininot measured- - 16
Ahmed Ben Bella6 decades - 17
Walter Cronkite7 decades - 18
Hans-Ulrich Rudel4 decades - 19
Sterling Haydennot measured- - 20
Ruth Handlernot measured- - 21
Peter Finch7 decades - 22
Betty Grablenot measured- - 23
Henrietta Lacksnot measured- - 24
Michael Gough4 decades - 25
Natalia Ginzburg8 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.