← Fame through time1970-1979
The 1970s
Whose names filled the books of the 1970s - 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 English books during the 1970s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus25 - 2
Aristotle6.3 - 3
Plato6.0 - 4
Homer4.8 - 5
Johns Hopkins4.5 - 6
George Washington3.7 - 7
Augustus3.1 - 8
Socrates2.8 - 9
Cicero2.7 - 10
Virgil2.6 - 11Ababa1.6
- 12
Thomas Jefferson1.5 - 13
John F. Kennedy1.5 - 14
Mark Twain1.4 - 15
Richard Nixon1.4 - 16
Woodrow Wilson1.4 - 17
Ovid1.3 - 18
Euclid1.3 - 19
Plutarch1.2 - 20
Abraham Lincoln1.2 - 21
Cleopatra1.1 - 22
Rembrandt1.1 - 23
Benjamin Franklin1.1 - 24
Indira Gandhi1.1 - 25
Theodore Roosevelt1.1
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1970s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Pope Francisnot measured- - 2
Joe Biden4 decades - 3
Elvis Presley7 decades - 4
Bob Dylan6 decades - 5
Ali Khamenei4 decades - 6
Bruce Lee5 decades - 7
Stephen Hawking4 decades - 8
John Lennon6 decades - 9
Muhammad Ali8 decades - 10
Saddam Hussein6 decades - 11
Paul McCartney6 decades - 12
Muammar Gaddafi2 decades - 13
Robert De Niro5 decades - 14
Woody Allen6 decades - 15
Pelé3 decades - 16
Al Pacino5 decades - 17
Jack Nicholson5 decades - 18
Bernie Sanders3 decades - 19
Harrison Ford4 decades - 20
Morgan Freeman3 decades - 21
George Harrisonnot measured- - 22
Chuck Norris4 decades - 23
Jane Fonda6 decades - 24
Jimi Hendrix5 decades - 25
14th Dalai Lamanot measured-
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.